


Eternity's Knight

by penumbria



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Apocalypse, Canon-Typical Violence, Discussions of Drug Use and Overdose, Gen, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Minor Character Death, Past Child Abuse, Rough Trade, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It, V-Day, mentions of past forced prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-23
Updated: 2017-08-23
Packaged: 2018-12-18 22:17:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 50,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11883981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/penumbria/pseuds/penumbria
Summary: Sub-Title: The Crossroad of InfinityIn 2015, Richmond Valentine set off his V-Day device and the Kingsman knights were unable to fully stop him. It activated for several minutes, though granted not the hours the mad genius had planned for. He was stopped and killed before his plans could be fully realized by a failed knight candidate who had watched the man kill his mentor. In 2038, Kingsman knight Mordred is sent back in time by Arthur to change the events of that year and save the world all over again.





	1. Episode One

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Kingsman and make no money from this.
> 
> Warnings: violence; murder; major character death; discussions/some brief descriptions of physical, sexual and mental child abuse; mentions of alcoholism, drug abuse and overdose; rape and forced prostitution; minor character death
> 
> This was my November 2015 Rough Trade story. For the Single POV challenge, written in first person and in episode format. 
> 
> Thanks to fanarts for the lovely first banner art and to my beta 2bloodhounds. This is a Kingsman story and is very canon typical with the violence and death and bad stuff.
> 
> A/N: I know Royal Ascot is actually held in late June but for the purposes of this story, it is held in late January. V-Day is February 14, 2015. The movie really made things seem like they all happened fairly quick and close together but those puppies grew a lot and so did Eggsy's little sister. When he left, she couldn't even sit up, by V-Day, she was definitely a toddler. He was gone longer than just a few weeks or even a couple of months. I am putting the timeline of his training at about 10 months, he met Harry at the police station in late April 2014 and the church in Kentucky was February 13, 2015. I feel that Kingsman recruit processing and winnowing would take at least 6 months depending on how quickly proposals were eliminated. But certain tests had to happen so at least six months between the water test and the dog test at a minimum. In this story it is 10 months due to many of the proposals making it through the tests.

 

“Alright, who are you?”

“Well, that’s an interesting question. Esoteric, deep, confusing. But you can call me Mordred. Agent Mordred or Knight Mordred, if you feel like being specific or formal.”

“Agent? What agency, then?”

I rolled my eyes and gave a breathless chuckle. “Granted, a title of ‘Agent’ is generic but ‘Knight’? Honestly, didn’t quite think that one through before opening your mouth, do you? You’re very bright, Eggsy, but your quick mouth will get you into trouble every time. And to make it official - Kingsman. I am an agent and a knight of Kingsman, an independent intelligence agency operating at the highest levels of discretion.”

“Nay, lad. There is no Mordred in the Round Table.”

“Nor would we ever open a slot of that name. It is - a despicable name.”

I smiled at my interrogators wryly. “I always felt like it was a bit of a spit in my face by the other knights when they granted me my name, Harry. At least, once I had done research on the original Mordred. But they insisted it was the correct name for me and the only one they would allow me to hold. If I wanted a spot at the Table, Mordred I would be.”

“I said, lad, there is no Knight Mordred, not in Britain, or any other branch of Kingsman.”

“Not yet, no, there isn’t.”

“Wait, wait. Why is it a despicable name, then? Who’s Mordred?”

I turn my head from the chief of my questioners and look at the youngest member of the group. “In the tales, Mordred was King Arthur’s illegitimate son by his half-sister who magicked Arthur and essentially raped him to get herself pregnant. He grew up hating and coveting his father's position and eventually went to war, destroying Camelot and killing Arthur. Mordred is the king killer, Eggsy.”

I watch the younger man wince and look down.

“Excuse me, _Mordred_ , but what did you mean, there is not yet a knight of your designation? Are you claiming to be psychic?”

“Ah, Roxy, oh, no, pardon me, I should use Lancelot, I’m not psychic nor am I claiming to be.”

“Then what was your meaning? Lancelot was correct, you phrased it oddly.”

“Ah, Galahad, I meant that I was named to the Round Table in March of 2015.”

“But, it’s February 2015! Yesterday was Valentine’s, yeah?”

I grinned slyly, “Oh, yes. But I was named after the events of February 14, 2015 when the results were being seen and more knights were needed.”

I watched the flicker on the young man’s face in front of me. He was bright, I knew that, and had a remarkable ability to put disparate pieces together to form a whole before others could even see the edges of the puzzle.

“Yer, You’re saying you come from the future, ya? You time travelled or somethin’?”

“Well done, Eggsy. That is precisely what I am saying.”

“Time travel is impossible. It is fiction.”

I shook my head in disappointment at the older knight. “No, Galahad. True, _currently_ , humanity doesn’t quite have the understanding or technology to time travel. But that will change in the next several decades. Or in my timeline it did.”

“I’m a Londoner, born and raised, bruv. I know all about the freaky, creepy stuff. And the rumors about the guy with no real name, always hoped to run into him, didn’t I. Friend of one of my friends went on some weird adventures in his blue box, but he ain’t no human. You’re saying that humans’ll be able to time travel in the next few decades? Without some alien help?”

The others in the room look at Eggsy, astounded, their eyes wide and mouths open. I’m not sure if they are all surprised by the same thing. I suspect that Roxy thinks he is a bit off of his nut, but Merlin and Harry, they would both know about Torchwood and the Doctor. They just are so used to dealing with upper class snobs who don’t know what those on the streets know.  I suspect they are flat footed at Eggsy’s possession of what they would think is very top secret knowledge.

“Yes, Eggsy, with no help from the one they call the Doctor or any other alien tech or influence. Granted, we aren’t completely clear on the temporal mechanics. After all, I have changed my past, so now there is no reason for me to return to change things in the future, so we somehow have gotten around the grandfather paradox. The Merlin in my time thought that if I succeeded in changing things, I would likely be in a parallel universe or something like that. I’m no scientist. I didn’t need to understand _how_ the machine worked, just that it _did_ and I could complete my mission.”

Merlin steps forward and looks me in the eyes. “We’ll take you at yer word fer now. You aren’t going anywhere. We can indulge you until we come up with an alternate theory or you change your story. So, taking it as a given that you time travelled, when did you come from?”

“When I stepped into the machine that sent me here it was January of 2038.”

“So, you travelled 23 years back in time?”

“Actually, it was closer to 24 years. I got here last March. I needed the time to complete all of my objectives. This wasn’t some simple mission like stopping a lone assassin. It required work and advance planning, both before I left and after I arrived.”

Harry stepped forward and took a chair and placed it in my line of sight before flipping it around and straddling it backwards. Even in such an undignified, common position, the older man looked like a complete gentleman. I don’t know how he could pull it off but he always did, elegance and grace, in all situations.

“So, you said you would be recruited next month -”

“No, I said I was appointed next month.”

“So, lad, you were already recruited? Did you wash out of a previous trial? You don’t look familiar. And I ran the last four training sessions.”

“Well, I have had extensive work done. About three years from now I was on a mission in Switzerland and the snow, it looked solid but it was actually just snow hanging off the side of the cliff. When I put my weight on it, I plummeted down over 150 meters. If it had been a sheer face, I would have died but it was filled with outcroppings, and I hit most of them before finally coming to rest on one. Broke both legs in multiple places, my left arm was a compound break, my right shoulder was dislocated, six of my fingers were broken from trying to grab onto something, my skull was fractured and both of my cheekbones, my left orbital bone and my jaw were broken from falling face first into several boulders. Plus assorted internal bleeding and contusions and cuts and bruises. My face needed lots of emergency reconstructive surgery and with all of my issues that needed surgery, making me look exactly like I had before wasn’t a priority. I was in physical therapy for over a year but I got everything back. And I’ve gotten used to this face. I’ve been seeing it in the mirror for around two decades now. Plus, I couldn’t take a chance on anyone recognizing me or finding things suspicious until after I finished my mission, so I’m also wearing tinted contacts. They don’t change the color, just the shade.”

“So, you have already been through Kingsman training by this point in time?”

I nod and both Merlin and Harry stare intently at my face, I can tell they are trying to find something familiar in the features. Roxy watches me but she I can see that she doesn't think she could possibly know me. But Eggsy, he is staring at his hands and biting his lower lip. He’s putting it together. Bright, indeed. He really was the one I was most worried about before now.

“Mordred, the king killer? And It was the only thing they would name you?” The younger man looks at me with wide, sad eyes.

“Yes.”

“And you were already recruited by now? Just not a knight, yet? You failed the trials?”

“Yes.”

“Ya couldn’t shoot the dog, could ya? Not fer that wanker.”

“No.”

“But ya killed him, didn’t ya? King killer. Not wif malice but it was him or you?”

“Yes. And used a nice little line there, I always felt.”

Eggsy smiles through the tears in his eyes. “I thought so.”

“What are you talking about, dear boy?”

I interject to spare him, or at least give him a minute to compose himself. I slip into the accent of my youth and quote myself, “The problem with us common types is, that we are light-fingered. Kingsman's taught me a lot, but sleight of hand - I had that down already.”

Eggsy nods at me. “Yeah, I was pretty sure. King killer. Me.”

I smile at him. “Yes, I go by Mordred and it is probably easier to refer to me that way, if only for the convenience of telling who we are referring to, but I was born Gary Edward Unwin, nicknamed Eggsy within hours by my father. I was his ‘little Easter egg’.”

Eggsy nodded with a sad smile. “It’s why I still go by such a kiddie nickname, innit? The connection to me dad. If he was still alive, I’d have bin using a different one long ago. Woulda saved a lot of teasin’, wouldn’t it? I’d never totally leave that name behind, even if it’s only in me mind, yeah? To me dad, I was Eggsy, so for memory of him, to everyone I’m Eggsy.”

I smile back at him and I take great pleasure in the gobsmacked looks on the faces of the others in the room.

 

Agent Mordred


	2. Episode Two

Banner art by me

 

Harry leaned forward, his face intent on me, “You’re telling us that you are Eggsy from nearly a quarter century in the future?”

“Yes.”

Eggsy defends me, his voice earnest. “I thought about it when he said Mordred was the king killer and all. I thought that if I got made a knight they could make me take that as my name. Then when he said he was from the future and all, plus he moves like me, look at ‘im. I mean, watch his face. Yeah, it ain’t the same face but the expressions, ya? The movements, the motions? It was like looking in a fun house mirror.”

Merlin nods, “Alright, lad. We’ll still suspend out disbelief.”

Harry’s expression is confused, his eyebrows lowered and his nose scrunched. “Why would you think you should be called a king killer, Eggsy?”

Eggsy stares at him, his mouth open and the others look just as confused. They are all realizing that none of them know what has been happening.

“Well, uh, after, uh, after the church -” Eggsy was shifting uncomfortably. I knew he didn’t want to admit to Harry what he had done. I used to be him and I know know that is what I would have been feeling at this point. I never wanted to disappoint Harry Hart in any way. But I always did.

Harry stopped him. “The church?”

“Yeah when you went nuts and then Valentine told ya why and then-”

Again Harry interjects, “I’ve not seen Mr Valentine since our encounter at the tailor shop, Eggsy.”

Eggsy, Merlin, and Roxy stare at him, confused and shocked. Their expressions tell the story to one who has been a spy for nearly a quarter century. None of them are bothering with poker faces, too many shocks to keep them up. I decide to try to help them all out.

“It’s a long story, Harry. And I’m afraid I have quite a bit to do with it.”

The three agents and my younger self turn back to look at me. “Alright, then enlighten us, Mordred, lad.”

“I said it was a long story, Merlin. And skipping around would just confuse everyone. No matter how odd it sounds coming from a time traveller, I believe I should tell it chronologically.”

“Fine then. Start when you arrived. You said you’ve been here for nearly a year?”

“Very well, we can start there if you wish:”

I stepped out of the glowing purple, bright yellow and orange portal - and truly it was as horrifyingly eye catching and stomach churning as it sounds - into a rarely used room in the tunnel of the London Underground, not far from Paddington Station. One of the techs, a math whiz and geography buff, who worked on the Plan knew the exact coordinates of the spot. His father had worked for the Underground as a track worker for most of his life and he had often gone exploring in his his youth. He was right. The room was empty, except for local wildlife. Honestly, the rats were as big as my forearm. It was disturbing but I’ve seen worse things. 

I knew the first thing that I had to do was determine if the math was correct in more than location. If I had arrived late, but not too late, we had contingency plans. If I had arrived too early, I just had to lay low. If I had had arrived too late, as in on or after February 14, 2015, I would have to infiltrate Kingsman and lay out Plan B. It wasn’t an ideal plan and was even more of a longshot than Plan A which started with time travel but it was something.

We had aimed to get me to arrive sometime between November 2013 and April 2014. That was the ideal window. And we hit right in the bull’s eye. I was wearing fashions from 2013, just in case, and I made my way through the tunnels to the closest platform. I had memorized the basic tunnel system around my expected landing spot and had the plans for the entire system on my contacts. 

In 2019, an American company perfected nanotechnology and Kingsman integrated it, making us much less noticeable. I know Merlin was always pissed that the previous Lancelot tended not to wear his glasses unless specifically instructed to do so, and wasn’t wearing them when he died, which led to lots of confusion about how he died but frankly, I always understood his reasoning. 

Some knights can pull off the look. Harry, excuse me, Galahad made it look absolutely natural. On Chester, they were almost expected, they looked so perfect. On Merlin, they give a definite edge of menace, the glare through them or worse, over them, was a killer. But on me, they always appeared a bit costumey, even when I was in my Kingsman suit. And on Lancelot, the current Lancelot, Roxy, they gave off an air of uptight librarian who wants to take them off, throw them across the room, let her hair down and have sex on the circulation desk like a bad porno. 

The nano-tech contacts fixed the issue. We could still get the info we needed and they interfaced with a nano-tech earbud that was actually imbedded in our ear canal to provide both sight and sound. And they couldn’t be seen. The suits were enough of a giveaway. Once the glasses went the way of eight track tapes, it was easier to blend for all of the knights.

Anyway, as you can tell, I still tend to ramble when I’m nervous or agitated so you’re just going to have to live with it. I came out onto the platform, barely escaping the rat things without having to shoot them, and found a newspaper. It was March 3, 2014. As you can imagine, I was absolutely elated. I had time to do everything I needed to do - and some that I  _ wanted _ to do but that wasn’t missions imperative - but wouldn’t have to lie low and be bored out of my mind for too long. That kind of downtime has never worked out well, for anyone.

I actually caught the tube and got off near Charing Cross. Very Harry Potter, I know. But unfortunately, I wasn’t headed for Diagon Alley. I needed access to a bank. For a number of reasons, I wasn’t able to bring any appropriate currency with me, just a few handfuls of gold and silver coins. All told, it was about £700, but I only needed enough until I accessed a few hidden caches. They were caches in various locations around the world accessible to Kingsman knights, but only those who were members of the Round Table. I knew where to find six just within two hours drive of London, two of them actually in London proper. And none of those six had been accessed since being stocked until I came back. Of course, by the time I came back, they were all inaccessible and had been for a while, but, the point remains. I knew how to get my hands on over £4 million. I just had to wait until night time. 

I had perfectly acceptable documentation, showing the name Ryan H. J. Mordred. The bank had no problems with the transaction of switching the gold and silver for pounds. For my next step, I rented a car. Nothing flashy, nothing memorable, just a regular, boring sedan. Silver, if you care. I drove to the suburb where the first cache was located and went to a small pub and had an absolutely smashing meal of shepherd’s pie with tons of mash on top and a very nice pint of Guinness.

Yes, Eggsy, I know that you don’t care for Guinness, but it was something I started drinking after, well, after Kentucky. A tribute, if you will. And I truly came to like it over time. My tastes actually changed a lot since I was you, young man. For one, I can no longer stomach fish and chips, which I know is a favorite of yours. But, well, fish, no, not if there is any other choice. And of course, that was the problem, too often, there wasn’t any other choice. Ugh. Fish. And I’ve taken quite a shine to raw carrots, as well as some other veggies. Basically, I grew up. But I still love a good plate of chips and cheese, particularly after a night at the pub.

Rambling knight again, my apologies. And I have a feeling that is going to get very old, very fast, so to pre-empt that annoyance - by which I mean the incessant apologizing for the same bloody thing - I give a blanket apology for any future rambling tangents or diatribes. I’m not entirely - stable, you know. After the things I've seen and done, it was inevitable. Frankly, I've never met a knight who was on the job for more than five years that was totally sane and normal. A warning to the youngsters in the room: the longer you’re a knight, the more eccentric you will become, and that is putting it mildly. 

And don’t even dare to give me a betrayed look, Harry Hart! You have a house filled with fucking dead things, butterflies and your fucking dog. You stuffed your dog and stuck it in the bloody downstairs loo! Honestly. All knights are a bit cracked, and Kingsman trains us to be absolute sociopaths. And some take it a bit further and turn the socio into psycho. It really _isn’t_ a wide line to step over. And as long as they keep their psychotic tendencies aimed at Kingsman’s enemies and not Kingsman itself or innocents, we don’t care. We never have.

After my wonderful meal, I made my way to my little rental car and drove in the increasing dusk to a field, where I used my headlights, aimed at a specific fence post, to blink out a Morse code password. Each cache had a slightly different mechanism for triggering it and obviously, a different password. That first one was  “San Graal” if you were curious. I found it fitting, personally, since I was chasing a Holy Grail of my own with the Plan. And I’m sure with that clue, Harry now knows exactly which cache I retrieved. There’s no point in going there now. I emptied all of them out as I opened them. I spent a week going to each one and obtaining the contents. In between, I stayed at a very nice, modest hotel on the outskirts of London.

Once I had all of the money and equipment, I went to a realtor and rented a house. It’s a cozy little cottage about a two hour drive outside of London, a bit isolated, in the middle of some woods, unpaved drive, two bedrooms, a modern kitchen and bath, a little carport to the side. It is very nicely furnished, not exactly to my tastes, it is very rustic feeling to go along with the location but it is comforting. I actually tend more towards antiques if you’d believe it. In taste, I mean. I like older things, always have, really but never got any chance at determining my taste in things like furnishings until after I became a knight. 

My house, the one I bought with my first - payment - from Kingsman was unfurnished. I had to go shopping and I was drawn to the sturdy, dark wood furniture. Not seriously high end stuff, like nothing with  _ history _ attached to it. But still, nothing made after 1920 or so. Most of it from the 1800s. I sort of surprised myself. The only modern concessions I made were the sofa in the television room and the mattress on my bed. Not the bed  _ itself _ . That was a fucking  _ four poster _ complete with curtains and steps. Heavy cherry wood. I miss that bed. 

But the safe house was sweet. _Is_ sweetly furnished. Rustic but not a hunter’s cabin, or at least, not decorated with heads of dead animals and fish and what all. No taxidermy there. Guess you wouldn't like it, Harry.

I had back ups, too, of course. I rented three other flats just in case. One in London near Stanhope Gardens and Gloucester Road, one in Folkestone, and one in Borehamwood, about ten minutes from the manor house HQ. I used all three at one point or another, but mostly I stayed in my little cottage. I couldn’t afford going to a Kingsman safe house. They are monitored and I don’t have the current pass codes so I made my own. And didn’t do too badly at it.

Once, I had my contingencies in place, I did research on the first stage of the actual Plan A. I hacked into Richmond Valentine’s systems. Now, I’m no genius or brilliant computer hacker. I had come prepared. The entire tech department had created detailed algorithms that would run on a limited AI. Relax, I said it was limited. Rudimentary and only capable of learning within the system parameters of hacking in and covering its tracks. We weren’t sure of the exact security protocols I would run into and I do  _ not _ have the know how to deal with it on the fly without backup from a tech whiz, which, once I got here, I wouldn’t have access to so they did what they could.

And it worked. The program got me into his systems and he never even knew he was hacked. I found out the locations and security at his chip factories. There were seven of them in five different countries. And I had to visit all of them. 

Valentine was a megalomaniacal insane arsehole, but he _was_ an undeniable genius - though at times he _was_ Mad-Eye Moody levels of paranoid. Granted, the paranoia was totally justified. The result in this case however, meant that none of the factories production computers were hooked up into an external network. I had the blueprints of his chips, both the ones in phones and devices as well as the ones that he implanted in people, and I had changes that I had to make to those blueprints before they were rolled into production. But his paranoia, combined with the parameters of the Plan, meant that I had to visit every single factory and upload the new blueprints.

Now, Richmond Valentine was a paranoid bastard. And his bodyguard, Gazelle, was worse by an order of magnitude. But his factory managers and personnel were nowhere near as bad. They didn’t know there was a reason to be. The only thing they thought would be an issue was potential corporate espionage, not James Bond type spies. And yes, I know that is a noxious comparison. However, to the layman, it is the best example there is. You say James Bond, everyone knows the idea of what you’re getting at. You say “an independent, international intelligence agency operating at the highest levels of discretion” and people have no clue what the bloody hell you are talking about.

Don’t get me wrong, Harry, it was a _great_ speech. I have incredibly fond memories of that first trip down in the fitting room elevator, “a young man with potential”, “a suit is the modern gentleman’s armour and the Kingsmen are the new knights”, “Trading Places”, “Nikita”, “ _ Pretty Woman _ ”. That last was a bit - hmm, well, once I finally saw the damn movie, it always made me wonder. Well, plus all that talk about popping cherries in the fitting room as well. But regardless, lovely speech. Sweet, and then to the point. But not understandable to the man on the street who didn’t see and know what I did at that point. Therefore, live with the comparison to James Bond. I promise I won’t call Merlin the Quartermaster. 

He taught me that lesson pretty quick.

But I was able to hack into the system to learn the security protocols of each factory. Only two of the seven required actual night-time break ins, with night vision goggles and black cat suit and all. They were fun, though; crawling through the vents, rappelling down into rooms that had floor pressure sensors, it was like a video game. And it had frankly been quite a while since I had been given any mission where that type of skillset was required. By the time I came back, there was no need for that kind of hijinks. I didn’t realize how very much I had missed it. The adrenaline rush, the danger kink, it was lovely. The only thing I missed was having Merlin or Nimue in my ear, providing directions and feedback.

The other five factories were easily infiltrated during the day. I was able to hack into their scheduling and put myself as an inspector from the head office. They usually had them come by every few months and occasionally surprise inspections that were closer in time. Those five had recently been visited and weren’t scheduled to be seen again for another two months. I showed up as a surprise inspection, which they knew could happen several times a year. And since they also knew that the head office was ramping up to a big new release that would be huge, they weren’t shocked at the idea of a bit of micro-managing by the head office. I just toured and inspected each place and then went to the computer control room and accessed the blueprints as part of my inspection. I connected to the changed plans and overwrote what was there. Really fairly easy. 

Of course, the fact that I didn’t have to insert a clunky drive into the computer helped hide what was happening. It was all wireless. Gotta love that new technology. The only reason I had to do two night runs was that one of the places had just been inspected. I mean, _just_ as in, two days prior to my arrival. And the other was scheduled for a surprise inspection two days after I was going to visit. So, I waited until after those inspections and went in at night.

And so, I got all of the blueprints at each factory changed, so they would be produced when called for but to _my_ specifications, not Valentine’s and he would have no idea. And there was a reporting mechanism in place in case someone either discovered the changes or new plans were input, overwriting my changes, so that I could fix it once more, if needed. 

Step One of Plan A was now complete. And it went off without any major hiccups. All happened according to possibilities thought of beforehand. The next step in the mission parameter, assuming no interference with the plans, wouldn’t be necessary for a few months. There were certain things that needed to remain the same or all of my future knowledge would have been worthless and obsolete. But that didn’t mean I didn’t have plans. They just weren’t part of my mission objectives. Or, well, not part of _Kingsman’s_ mission objectives. But, I _was_ always a bit of a loose cannon, wasn’t I?


	3. Episode Three

Banner by fanarts

 

Well, I’m a _person_ , aren’t I? Do I not bleed and all that? I’m not some automaton with no feelings and they knew plenty well that I had a personal stake in all of this. I mean, I was _there_. I was on the scene for the original events. I knew almost all of the players, on some level or another, the exception being the previous Lancelot and Professor Arnold but that didn’t matter.

What mattered was I knew major players like Galahad, Arthur, Merlin, Valentine, Gazelle, Roxy, and well, me. And I had a stake in what happened to them, not to mention others like my mum and sis, Dean and his gang, my mates: Ryan and Jamal. I would carry out my mission, I wasn’t going to let other things get int the way of that. But I had my own personal mission, didn’t I? Maybe I was selfish but it wasn’t like Arthur - future Arthur, I mean, not Chester King - didn’t know I would try to do some of what I had planned. He actually wished me luck in one of my personal objectives before I left. They all fucking knew I was going to do my very fucking best to keep Galahad alive this time. But I couldn’t compromise my primary mission to do it. But that’s in the future of my story. The only relevance was that what I did next had little to do with the primary objectives and everything to do with my selfish motives.

I needed to keep track of what was going down, first of all and I knew that a fair few important events were going to go down in a little pub near the council estate where Eggsy lives. The Black Prince. Such a pretentious name for such a dingy little pub. Don’t get me wrong, I used to love that place. The owner was a real gem. Helped me out of rough spots a fair few times. Let me do some under the table work to get a few pounds every once in awhile. But still, pretentious name, I always thought. Sounded all posh and then you walk in and see the interior - which I guess wasn’t too bad - and the clientele. Yeah, didn’t fit.

Anyway, getting back on track, I knew several pivotal events should be taking place in that dingy pub within a few weeks of my completion of the factory tours. So, one night after last call, when it was all locked up, I broke in. I covered that little place in surveillance equipment. Cameras, mics, everything. I needed to be sure I hadn’t inadvertently changed a major event just by my existence. So, I had the place filled with more bugs than Harry’s hallways at the mews house.

No, Harry, I am never letting your obsession with dead creepy crawlies go anytime soon.

I put cameras in the corners, along the bar, above some of the signs and pictures, on the door, under several of the tables and on the tables of the booths. Those ones blended into the crack between the table and the wall. I put mics all over, too, but made sure to have ones in three specific places, on one of the tables in the middle of the room, it was the regular table I always sat at with my old friends. Another in a specific booth, the center one along the back wall. And one just above the front doors. I have always wished I had footage of that first day, that drink and what followed. I wasn’t about to miss this opportunity.

It was about six days after I planted the bugs that Eggsy came in with his two mates and sat at their regular table. Well, actually, he was in that pub with them four of those six nights but I knew, based on his posture when he came in, and the clothes he was wearing, that this was the night I was waiting for. And when I heard their conversation, Ryan’s comment about how “Eggsy’s mum is well fit” and Jamal’s rejoinder about her low self-esteem, I knew exactly why he was in the pub that night.

I had been keeping an ear open all that week, every night, only looking and watching when they first came in every night. I knew that there was no reason to watch Eggsy get buzzed with his mates when it wasn’t going to lead to the confrontation I was waiting for. 

_Frankly_ , Eggsy, because it was hard enough listening to them, I didn’t need to put myself through self-inflicted torture of seeing Ryan and Jamal, alive and happy for nights when it wasn’t important to what I needed to do. I listened because things _could_ have been a little different and the clothes could have been different but I knew the triggers for what would bring you to Kingsman, Eggsy. I remembered the depths of fury I was feeling that night, the absolute helplessness, knowing once again I couldn’t protect my mother and that she wasn’t cognizant enough to even want me to try, the need to hurt Dean in some small way, even if it was through his head goon, wishing I could kill them all but settling for lifting Rottweiler’s keys and taunting him by joyriding in his car. Knowing even as I did what was happening back in the flat. 

I knew that the trigger in the pub would be Jamal’s gesture towards the goons and Rottweiler feeling threatened and needing to assert alpha dog privilege in the absence of his true alpha. I didn’t need to watch Ryan get drunk and trip over the table two nights before, face planting into Jamal’s fish and chips. I didn’t need to see Jamal’s face as he waxed so poetic over his girlfriend. I can remember those things just fine. 

I knew when I accepted the assignment to carry out the Plan that I would be confronting and dealing with lots of people who were dead when I came from. I had plans for preventing some of those deaths. But I didn’t think about some of the deaths I would be seeing. I wasn't prepared for my reaction to seeing Ryan and Jamal again, alive, happy, healthy, laughing, enjoying life regardless of its hardships. It hurt a lot more than I expected. I had to turn it off or try, just to keep from going completely insane.

In my memory, in my past, the timeline I was working to change, Ryan died today, February 14, 2015, popularly referred to in the future as “V-Day”, a day more infamous than “September 11th” or “Bloody Sunday” or “Pan Am 103 in Lockerbie” or the “London transport bombings” combined. He was run over by a double decker bus, _with deliberation_ by the driver. It was not in the least an isolated incident. He was one of 267 killed by that bus or another in the city that day. And that number might have been higher but some were hit by multiple vehicles and so couldn’t be determined to be caused directly by a bus. Cars, lorries, buses, even motorbikes, they all became deadly weapons that day. And the worst part was that no one was punished for the deaths they caused. The lack of closure was hard to endure for many.

And Jamal, well, he and I drifted out of touch after I became a knight. We weren’t in the same neighborhood anymore and we weren’t in the same place in life. He survived V-Day but his girlfriend, the one he was carrying that ring in his pocket for weeks trying to get up the nerve to propose to, they were engaged by then and she survived the day but she couldn’t handle her actions. She was one of those who had been driving and had run over a lot of people before she crashed her car. She ended up taking too many sleeping pills a few weeks after V-Day. Jamal never got over her death on top of everything else.

We still emailed each other once a month or so and met up a couple of times a year but we were both so different, it was hard. Then he died during The F - er - well, during a major disaster two years before I came here. I’ll discuss more about that disaster later, believe me. It just would complicate things right now but it definitely has connections to what I came here to do.

So, anyway, Eggsy, it was difficult for me to see them. They _were_ my best friends for so much of my young life and we went through so much before I became a Kingsman candidate, it was hard to see them, alive and unscarred.

But I needed to keep track of the major players and events, to determine what, if anything had changed, so I dealt with it the best I could. Once you and they entered on the night in question, the night that you ran out of the flat in a strop because Dean intimated he and Poodle were going to share your mum, the night Ryan was drooling over her and Jamal was discussing her psychology, I kept watch completely. 

I had several angles that picked up on your sleight of hand when you pickpocketed Rottweiler and absconded with his car keys. It was very smoothly done but not totally unnoticeable on surveillance. Of course, it helped that I knew what was happening. Or what I hoped would happen. And it did. 

Just as I once had, you and your mates drew the attention of Dean’s top lieutenant and the thugs he was with. You, as I, got into a verbal taunting match before seemingly backing down when he pushed. In reality, you lifted his car keys to that obnoxious yellow thing he drove, just as once upon a time I had done. I was pleased when I heard the squealing of the tires as you did the donuts outside of the pub. It was so arrogant but I remember the roil of emotions in my gut that night, so I can understand. 

We were young and angry and frustrated at our life and the hopelessness of it. Dean had us by the balls in more ways than one and whenever we tried to get out, we were pulled back by his machinations. By our love for our mum and then Daisy. So we acted out and that night it all came to a head. 

I watched Rottweiler run out of the pub and then come back in to wait for the police. I saw him and his posse stow their illegal goods, like his gun and the drugs they sold, in various bolt holes around the room. I saw and heard his conversation with the police. He didn’t give you up. He said he didn’t know who stole the car. He didn’t grass on you. Not to the cops. Just later to Dean. He knew better than to involve the authorities more than he had to. Once he saw the cops chasing you, he knew he had to report the car theft but he wasn’t going to get into it beyond that. He wanted to handle your punishment himself and he knew that if you were able to evade the police, Dean would let him.

I went to bed that night, hoping that you would remember the medal around your neck and the favor you were told accompanied it. I hoped that you wouldn’t be scared off by the absurdly ridiculous “Customer Service” line and would give your message. I felt good about the matter. Everything else had been continuing on its same path. I couldn’t see where I had caused anything that would make a deviation now.

The next afternoon, I found that my faith had not been misplaced. The timing was working out the way I recalled and you walked into the Black Prince with Harry Hart at your side. You sat in the center back booth and each had a pint. 

I heard you probe, unsubtly, for information about how your dad and Harry knew one another and how your dad saved his life. I listened to Harry’s holier than thou speech about how Lee would have been disappointed in you. 

Frankly, Harry, listening to your utter sanctimonious _assholery_ was just as infuriating the second time around. Where you got off just assuming that I had become lazy or bored with things, to lecture me on it and comment that Dean was just an excuse and a crutch to avoid getting a better life. So, you had a file on my life. My school transcripts, my public records, my police records, _big fucking deal_. I was a kid when my barely functioning alcoholic mother married the thug and small time mobster that was Dean Baker. 

And for your information, I dropped out of gymnastics because Dean found it too prissy and broke my collarbone to stop me from going. There’s no record of that because I didn’t go to A&E for it. One of his gang set it and put me in a sling. A lot of my injuries were handled _in house_ as it were. 

I spent my childhood and young adulthood trying to do what you had told me to do when my dad died: take care of my mum. But she didn’t want my care except when she was so high that she thought I was my dad. Or when she was pregnant and Dean was in lockup doing 3 months for driving violations. You were born with a silver spoon up your arse and had no idea what Lee’s death had pushed my life to. Yet you were so arrogant as to believe a hastily put together file told you what you need to know.

<><><>

Sorry if I’m embarrassing you Eggsy but this was my life, too, and I’ve waited a long _fucking_ time to bring it up. The only chance I had previously was the blow up in that booth about silver spoons and that got interrupted. I need to get this out and quite frankly, Harry could use a reality check. 

You said that you felt so guilty about my dad dying and saving your life, you came and brought that medal and offer of a favor and then walked away and didn’t look back until I called when there was no other choice. Then that fucking fight when I wouldn’t shoot and kill the dog that I raised from a puppy. Everything you had done was for my dad, not for me, all for him. I should have realized - all I was was a way to appease your guilty conscience. If you had actually cared about _me_ or frankly, about my dad, you would have been around since he died, even if it was from a distance. Keeping an eye out, watching over me and my mum. 

That night, the night you came to tell us he was dead, after you left, she got drunk, she downed a bottle and a half of Scotch, the good stuff that guys in my dad’s unit had given him for Christmas, that they saved for special occasions and dinner parties. Looking back as an adult, I’m amazed she didn’t die from alcohol poisoning. She downed all of that in under two hours. She would have kept going if she hadn’t passed out. And frankly, I didn’t see her completely sober again until I got her into rehab after I became a knight. And even that didn’t last very long. And I think I was around 9 when she added drugs to the alcohol. And when she met Dean, the drugs became harder and more pervasive. 

She was so high all of the time, I’m not sure she even would recognize half of Dean’s gang if she were clean. Mum just completely fell apart after he died and couldn’t bear to look at me some days, I looked so much like him. I had to learn fast to care for myself. I did my best to do what the man in the suit told me to do, take care of my mother. That phrase imprinted on my brain, Harry. And it informed my life from that moment on. 

I did things that I hate to try and keep her fed. I let Dean do things to me and make me do things that I shudder to recall. It never made it into any police records, I was never picked up for that. Dean was  _ very _ careful with that line of his business. No friend of a friend of a friend recommended me shit for that. For the drugs, fine, for the stolen merchandise, okay, for the regular prostitution, a reference from someone he knew was fine. For the underage prostitution - and I was by no means the only one, believe me - he had to know you personally, for years,  _ and  _  have provable dirt on you to let you have a go. And it wasn’t just his mates that applied to. He had plenty of contacts with the more high and mighty from his other lines to have plenty of clients for that line. 

And I thought at the time, when we met again, that Harry knew. I mean, he seemed so omniscient, with his file on me and the spy gig. I thought he lost it because he didn't want people thinking he would stoop to a chav whore like me. It took me years to realize that if it wasn’t public record, he had no idea. He hadn’t been watching through the years. He didn’t know anything that wasn’t documented. 

When it finally came up, during my physical therapy after the fall down the mountain, Merlin nearly had a heart attack. They had no idea how bad it was. And good Lord but Merlin was _vicious_ in his revenge when he did find out. He felt horrible that he hadn’t kept track any more than Harry had. 

He was there, in the room, when our dad died, Eggsy. Merlin didn’t just know him from being his trainer. There were four of them, I read the file. It was Dad, Harry, Merlin, and James - the other candidate for Lancelot. They were on a mission to infiltrate a terrorist base with extreme prejudice and get information from a particular target. They caught him and he was tied up and Harry was interrogating him, much the same as he worked Professor Arnold, and he didn’t see when the terrorist bent forward that he had pulled the pin of a grenade with his teeth. But _Dad_ saw it. And he decided to play like he was Steve Rogers. But it was not a dummy and it blew, killing him and the terrorist and leaving James to instantly become Lancelot.

So, Merlin felt just as connected to Dad as Harry did. But neither one thought about the fact that Dad wasn’t from the same kind of background as the other recruits that washed out or died during training. They knew and had no problem with his lower class origins, but it didn’t compute in their brains that his family wouldn’t have an inheritance or even death benefits since he wasn’t in the Royals anymore when he died. 

So, until we stepped forward and asked for help, we fell through the cracks. Ironically, the only one who ever did anything for us was the candidate who got the job Dad was trying to get. James. I didn’t realize it, not for years, not until I was looking over old files and saw his picture. 

Remember the guy who came in when Rochester was - enjoying himself. Sick, sadistic bastard. Remember how Rochester disappeared after that and you always wondered why he hadn’t followed through on all his sick plans he liked to detail when he was whipping us? That was James. He killed him. If you really think hard, you’ll remember. Seeing his picture brought it back for me. Seeing him nearly glowing with rage as he reached out and grabbed that bullwhip and wrapped it around Rochester’s neck, seeing that pedophile’s eyes bulge out as he so slowly strangled him with his own torture instrument. After he was dead, James cleaned us up and sedated us. 

And within a week, Dean was in jail for eight months. It was for drugs but Dean was too careful to leave evidence of what he did to me and other kids. It was an awesome eight months, though. Mum didn’t get clean, she didn’t _want_ to get clean but it was just us in the flat. Dean’s goons didn’t have the balls to try and move in. They still supplied her with her drugs and I still had to see to my regulars but they weren’t bad. Mostly blow jobs and fucking. I was 13.

Then when Dean got out, Rochester was missing and Dean never found another client for me that was so into inflicting pain. Spanking, sure, hair pulling, pinches, whatever. But nothing that scarred. James did what he could but still stayed in the background. And Dean started getting picked up on the regular whenever I walked around with visible injuries. He never spent so long locked up again but any respite was great.

Harry or Merlin or both could have done that. Not showing up except when there was no other choice but working behind the scenes to help. But they didn’t even think about it. They never checked and James never said anything to them. He just looked after us as best as he could. He was a good man. And I wish I could have really known him, personally.

And I’ve always wondered how else he got involved. If I ever saw him _before_ that night. There were always some blank areas in my head after Dean showed up in mum’s life. I just assumed at the time that he had knocked me unconscious and I had a blackout around the head injury. But now, I wonder if James intervened in things that went down and darted me. I’ll never know. He didn’t leave notes behind about it. I’m guessing he didn’t want anyone who would disapprove to find out and stop him, like fucking Chester. Or some of the other prigs of the Round Table.

Huh, well, that was quite the diversion into the wild blue yonder of my childhood, wasn’t it. Sorry about that Eggsy but I needed to get that out, I suppose. Catharsis. Hmmmm.

Let me get back to my story.

I watched Rottweiler and the gang interrupt Eggsy in his righteous indignation at Harry. I listened as Harry attempted to be a gentleman, snarky, yes, but a gentleman and get them to go away. 

Yes, Harry. Snarky. “ _ So whatever your beef with Eggsy is - and I'm sure it's well founded - _ ” Snarky! Decidedly snide and snarky! Putting me in my place, weren’t you? 

Then I watched and listened as Eggsy returned Harry’s gentlemanly behavior with some of his own, urging him to go so he wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire of Eggsy’s beat down at the hands of the gang. And I watched Harry get up and start to leave only to be stopped when Poodle couldn’t resist a jab of his own. It was aimed at Eggsy, you know, even though he stated it to Harry. 

But for whatever reason, the comment about finding rent boys on Smith Street stopped Harry in his tracks. I’ve never been sure if he was actually leaving at that moment or just getting them to drop their guards while he locked the doors. At the time when it was happening to me, I was sure he was leaving me to face my punishment. I had cashed in the favor from the medal and wasn’t going to be in jail and his part was over. But I’ll tell you, this time, those cameras caught his face as he walked towards the doors,  _ before _ Poodle’s comment. I don’t think he was leaving. I don’t think he was planning to go as far as he did  _ after  _ the taunt but I think he was getting into a better position and trying to keep civilians out of the way of whatever came.

Regardless, Poodle taunted, “If yer lookin’ fer anover rentboy, they’re on the corner uv Smith Street”, and I watched Harry stiffen.

I watched, in full technicolor on multiple screens as Harry stalked to the doors and began locking them, a word accompanying each snick of a lock engaged. “Manners.” He pushed the left side upper lock. “Maketh.” He pushed the upper left lock. “Man.” He locked the lower lock. 

I was even more enthralled this time, since I knew what was coming and didn’t think I was about to see the man who kept me out of jail from getting killed or badly hurt by the men who had helped destroy my childhood. 

“Do you know what that means?” Harry asked them as I watched them swarm towards him in a group. I could see him watching them in the reflection of one of the signs next to the door. “Then let me teach you a lesson.”

He hooked his damn Rainmaker around a discarded glass next to him and used it to throw it backwards. It hit Rottweiler right between the eyes and knocked him right out.  Then he decided to snark at this group of thugs whose leader had just been felled by a beer mug. “Are we going to stand around here all day, or are we going to fight?” 

They knew no other response but the latter and one of them took a swing at Harry only for it to be diverted into smacking Poodle across the face and knocking out a tooth. Oh, that fight. It was awe inspiring. No one _ever_ stood up to them. Not for long. And not so winningly. But Harry took them all out in under two minutes with an umbrella. 

I could give you a blow by blow, I’ve watched the footage enough, but you get the idea. I watched Harry take out six of Dean’s goons and dart the bartender to make him forget what he saw. Then he just strolled back to the booth, sat down and drank the rest of his pint. I looked at Eggsy in the feeds and remembered the struggle I had in that moment. I’ve always somewhat regretted not taking that opportunity but I’m pretty sure it wouldn't have happened even if I had. Harry is too much the gentleman. It would have been too wide a power imbalance. But what would have changed if I _had_ stopped him from leaving without me that day? 

But I didn’t when it was me and Eggsy didn’t as I watched Harry bid him goodbye and grasp his shoulder, placing a tracker/transmitter at the same time. I hacked the feed of the transmitter and listened to what followed. 

Don’t get huffy, Merlin. I had the advantages of one, knowing it was there, two, knowing the frequency, and three, future tech based on the tech used now. 

I followed at a small distance as Eggsy eventually left the pub, wander a bit and then unthinkingly go back to the council estate. I watched him go inside the flat, watched from across the way as Rottweiler and some of the other goons gathered around outside, and listened to Dean threaten to cut Eggsy’s throat with a  meat cleaver. I heard Harry intervene with the “voice of God”. And I watched as Eggsy exited the flat, slipped away from the gang by jumping to another building and running down walls. I watched him head to Savile Row and I listened as he agreed he had nothing left to lose and took the elevator to the bullet train beneath the tailor shop.


	4. Episode Four

Banner by me

 

I told you that before I came back, Arthur knew that I would do more things than just the straight mission parameters. He knew I would have personal priorities as well. And he trusted me to put the overall mission first. And I did. There was no point to changing the fates of a few people, no matter how I felt about them, if the world went to hell. So, we had plans and timelines. Multiple plans on differing timelines since we didn’t know for sure that I would arrive correctly. There was even a small chance that I would overshoot my mark not by months, which was the most likely mistake, but by years or even decades. I could have arrived here before I was actually born. 

Thankfully that didn’t happen and I arrived in the perfect spot but the fact was that Arthur knew that in that event, the timelines had to have room for … let’s call it me playing the hand of fate. If I hadn’t had time and room to handle personal missions, I would have broken. And Arthur knew that. He knew that I would handle the Kingsman mission first but that I was human and had lost so much, I needed to fix more than the world, itself. Frankly, that was the case for anyone who could have been sent back, even Arthur himself. All of us had personal things we would change, people who had died or were lost one way or another that we would want to save or people who survived and even prospered that we would want to destroy.

I was the best fit for this mission, due to my age and my inside knowledge of so much of the original timeline. Arthur was too old, for the possible constraints of the mission. Merlin - our Merlin, not you - was too young. They were barely out of diapers when it all went down. The other knights - well, I was the best fit. You’ll understand more later. 

But my point here, is that now that I had completed the first phase of my Kingsman mission and made sure that Eggsy and Harry were on the road to what I remembered - which, granted was at least partially a personal mission but only partially - I had time to work on my completely personal list. And the lists for some of the others. Arthur allowed everyone to give me two priority side missions, mostly people to keep safe, though his own was two lists, one of people to keep safe, one of people to put in harm’s way.

Eggsy was in training at the Kingsman HQ, being nearly drowned and meeting JB. Harry was working on a plan - foolish and confronting and brash - of getting information from Professor Arnold that would lead to him in a coma, the professor's death, the eventual outing of Kingsman to Valentine, and the road to figuring out who was behind everything on Kingsman’s part when Harry got tired of being unconscious and taking a beauty sleep.

My Kingsman mission - and personal missions dealing with Kingsman - had no room for change within that parameter. Those things needed to happen. So unless Eggsy washed out early, which I couldn’t imagine, or Harry grew a Slytherin brain and used it over his brash Gryffindor plan, I wouldn’t need to interfere at Kingsman for a bit.

So, I turned to the personal lists. Top of mine - Dean Baker. I couldn’t do anything that would interfere before Eggsy lost his temper and stole Rottweiler’s car. So, I had to wait until the time was right. But I had been watching, gathering evidence on him and the gang. And now it was time to move. 

I wanted him to suffer. To see everything suddenly falling apart as if he had been cursed. Karma’s a bitch and I was her sword. I began by getting Rottweiler and Poodle picked up. They had been in a big deal not long before and the cops were actually looking for them, they just didn’t know who they were looking for. But Rottweiler and Poodle had hijacked a shipment of drugs from another gang and in their escape, the morons had crashed their car. The problem, they didn't hit a tree or a ditch. They took out a family, a mother and her three kids, who were cycling to the park. The kids were 5, 8, and 11. And their dad wasn’t there because he was on duty. At Scotland Yard. He was pretty high up in the CID.

So the cops were looking hard for the perpetrators. There were no cameras near the crash. It was in a blind spot, the mugs got lucky. That’s one reason Eggsy’s cop was pressing so hard. They knew it wasn’t him. His driving was too good and the accident was caused by a bad driver. Plus, he crashed and ended the chase to avoid hitting a fox. He wouldn’t have hit that family. But they thought that whoever he was with might have been involved. Or that he knew about it. 

It’s also why Dean was so worked up. He knew the cops were up in arms and he thought the reason Eggsy was out rather than doing a long stint was because he informed on Dean or Rottie and Poodle. Of course, I didn’t know any of this the first time around.

Maybe I’m cold. I could have saved that family. I could have at least saved the kids. But I didn’t. I taped it. Made sure to get great shots of their gaping faces when they stumbled out of the car, made sure to get an angle that showed the pistol Rottie always carried in his waistband so it would be clear he was armed and dangerous. I played it up, acting like I had been taping some birds - and yes, I mean _actual_ birds, no slang or euphemism, Eggsy - and heard the car coming and lowered the camera to watch it. I then hid behind a wall, whispering distortedly like I was terrified these goons would see me. I even caught Poodle on tape being a complete moke and taking the woman's fucking wedding ring off her dead finger while Rottie waved his gun at him to get him moving. And I got good, if shaky, pictures of them hauling the drugs out of the backseat before taking off.

Then I just kept mumbling about not wanting to get killed by these guys before ending the video. 

Yes, Eggsy, I’ve changed from when I was you. Joining Kingsman at all started the changes but the true catalyst was what happened to me on V-Day, what I did that day that you did not. Those actions and decisions fundamentally started me on the road to where I am now. I don’t know that if given the order to shoot JB today, if I would do it. But not because of any sentiment or feeling of right or wrong. No, more as a matter of trust. Granted, that was a big part of the problem with Eggsy’s actions that day, too. I firmly believe, and always have, that if Roxy and I had switched handlers for that “mission” and _Merlin_ had given me the order, I would have done it. I would have thought of confronting him after the parachute and being told to whisper in his ear. But I _never_ trusted Chester King. 

Rightly on many levels. Later review of how he had it set up, if I had done what he told me to do, I would have killed JB, blank or not. The distance to from the barrel of the gun to his head was so short, even the pressure from firing a blank would have killed him. And the prick knew it. But now, if I trusted the order, I would do it. 

I don’t follow orders blindly and that is one of the things that test checks. Yes, it checks for your level of commitment to Kingsman, your ability to reason under pressure - see if you can figure out it is a trick, like the parachute test, your skillset - see if you can feel the gun holds blanks, but it also is checking your ability to simply do as you are told. And I found that _incredibly_ dangerous. 

After I became Mordred, I actually did a poll of the knights. I was curious who had simply did what they were told and who could tell they were blanks or went along due to another trick. Every single knight that I was able to poll, knew it was a trick of some sort. Three of them could tell the bullets were blanks, one of them assumed it was a trick of some sort like so many of the tests - like the train or lack of parachute, five actually listened to the actual order and followed it to the letter if not the presumed spirit. They aimed at their dog’s leg.  _ “Shoot the dog“  _ not  _ “kill the dog”. _ Roxy was one of those. And two of the older knights told me that they knew about three knights who simply followed the order, no thoughts of disobeying, no hesitation, just “Shoot the dog” and bang. One of those knights was Chester King. The other two died on V-Day. And that will make more sense later.

So, it was a deeply flawed test. But for many reasons, I might pass it today. I am perfectly able to sacrifice the one for the good of the many. I can be very Vulcan in my logic when it is called for. I had to learn to be or I would never have survived what is coming. Or hopefully, now it is more, what  _ would have _ come.

[ _ “I trusted my tester and remembered the other tricks in the tests.” _ ]

I always assumed that. I remember you being so upset that I didn’t think about the twists and telling me about Amelia not being dead but being a plant. Thing was, of course, I didn’t know about that at the time. I knew that Merlin had been lying about one of us not having a parachute. Or rather, he didn’t outright  _ say _ that, he implied it in such a way that, high on adrenaline, we all inferred it. And of course, I was fresh off of the train test which was a twisted twist. But I didn’t know about Amelia. I thought that the entire training had begun with one of the recruits being killed. Plus, I knew that my dad had died during  _ his  _ selection process. So, I had no reason to trust that JB would survive. And frankly, thinking back on everything, I’m not convinced that gun did have blanks in it. It wouldn’t have surprised me if they were live rounds. That wanker was really quite worried when I pointed it at his head. But we can never know for sure, so I’ve moved beyond it. 

Regardless, I can be cold blooded and I wanted Rottweiler and Poodle out of the way. And I didn’t want them dead. Or, more to the point, I didn’t want them to have an _easy_ death, a quick assassination at my hands. I wanted them to suffer. In my past, the cops eventually identified them as the killers but they never paid for it. They slithered out of it because there wasn’t untainted evidence. This time, I wanted them to pay. To fear. To face real punishment that they couldn’t bribe their way out of. So, the family had to die the way they had before.

After I was assured that Eggsy meeting Harry and getting into Kingsman happened the same way as before, I arranged for the video to get to the police anonymously. They didn’t really need the one who took the video, once they documented its authenticity. 

Three days after you nearly drowned at Kingsman HQ, Eggsy, the police raided Poodle’s flat and took him and four others who were there and in the midst of cutting and bagging some of the drugs when the raid occurred, to jail. 

Two of them grassed Dean up, not Poodle of course, and they were both low level thugs who didn’t know anything beyond the marijuana and cocaine business, and not much of that. But it was enough for Dean to be picked up and sent to jail for a while, awaiting trial. 

It took Scotland Yard eight more days to find Rottweiler and he was such an idiot and his temper was so bad, he ended up in a gun battle with them. He winged two officers, his aim was really shit unless it was point blank, and took five bullets center mass. None of them were immediately fatal shots. He lingered and had several operations, in severe pain. He finally died during his sixth surgery, a month after he had been shot. His death was lingering and drawn out. I found it much more acceptable than if he had simply died during the shootout. He deserved every bit of pain he felt during that month.

The two thugs who had informed on Dean got released from jail after serving two weeks as a reward for their good behavior and squealing. I approached them, separately and convinced them it would be in their best interest to leave town and never come back. They agreed. They didn’t want to face Dean when he got out anyway and they  _ really  _ didn’t want to face me or find out if my threats were real. I assure you, they were.

While you were running the estate with JB tucked in your vest and playing war games with the other recruits, I was slowly dismantling Dean’s operations.He had gotten four months in jail for the drugs he had on him when he was picked up but with the witnesses going missing and there being no other evidence, he didn’t go down for anything harder.

During the first month, I arranged raids on all of his drug houses, from the distribution centers - where the addicts could go to buy and take at the same time - to the packaging centers. Anonymous tips, neighborhood complaints about noise or strange smells, even others who got picked up grassing on those they knew. 

And when any low level dealers or runners got out, I put the fear of me in them. They all took the out I gave and ran. Twice, a higher level dealer got out on bond. One of them actually was also a pimp for Dean’s prostitution business as well, though the police didn't know that. 

I approached the first dealer and suggested he get out of town. He didn’t take my offer. He was belligerent and outright stated that I didn’t scare him. He changed his mind about that before the end. And his death was actually relatively easy. I beat him quite hard but I didn’t torture him. It had to look like a gang retaliation. I didn’t care if the police thought it was a rival gang or his own people who didn’t trust him anymore. I just left major bruises and a couple of incidental broken bones, a few ribs and a couple of fingers when I stomped on his hand. Then I shot him execution style. I didn’t display his body but I didn’t go to a lot of trouble to hide it either. 

The other dealer pimp didn’t get offered an escape. I knew him from when I was one of Dean’s boys. He was brutal and rough with the women he had in the “stable” Dean let him run. I wasn't about to let him have it easy. I found him alone and took my time. _Him_ , I tortured. Cuts, burns, broken bones - that were _not_ incidental, removed fingernails, and in the end, he bled out from my final step, a crude castration. And just to point the police in the right direction, after he was dead, I put it in his mouth and taped it shut.

Scotland Yard got the idea and followed the trail of documents that I made sure were easily accessible in his apartment to his girls. By the end of Dean’s third month in jail, all of his prostitution rings were gone, the girls and boys rescued, the pimps arrested or dead. Even his underage ring was gone, one of the rent boys having been a part of it before he grew up - much like me. He told the cops everything that he knew - which unfortunately didn’t include anything about Dean - and they saved over a dozen kids between 9 and 15 from being sold to dirty old men.

Once Scotland Yard understood the size of the operation, even if they couldn’t find its head, they refused deals that would let any of them back on the street. They didn’t want them to run or to be killed. Before they made that decision, three had been released. 

The first one was a new pimp. He had actually been a rent boy himself when he was a kid and had impressed some of the pimps and got out. They moved him up and he was running four rent boys of his own, none underage though. I scared him into leaving and bribed him, too. He took the money and ran.

The other two I killed, neat and clean, execution style. After death I castrated them to send the message to both the police and the gang. It worked. The cops stopped releasing them and the free gang members who were involved in the prostitution ring but not pimps ran. 

The theft ring and stolen goods section of Dean’s operations fell apart on its own as the rest went down. It was never a large area, it was more incidental than anything else. And then it was two weeks until Dean’s’ release.

I had one more thing to do. His gang was gone, in jail, missing, or dead. His illegal enterprises had been totally dismantled. He only had one thing left. Michelle and Daisy. Not that he cared about Daisy at all. She wasn’t his biological daughter. Neither he nor Michelle knew who her father was. Michelle was too high to even know she was being fucked half the time. And Dean didn’t care. If you paid the fee he asked, or if he owed a favor or a boon, he whored out his wife. But Daisy could be harmed or used as some kind of leverage or even a gift to some of the sickos that Dean knew as clients.

So, I had Michelle picked up on drug use charges and an old friend went to court to arrange for her to be involuntarily committed to rehab. And they took custody of Daisy, at least until Eggsy would be available. 

You don’t know him, Eggsy. At least, not yet. His name’s Mickey. He’s a good guy. He has a past of his own and he  _ knows  _ about things. I was able to tell him things that got him to trust me and he and Daisy stayed at the safehouse I bought. He can’t keep her long term but was willing to give it a few months. He’s good with her. And his wife is awesome.

So, then Dean got out of jail. He went to the flat and it was empty. I had it bugged and wired for video and sound. He went to the Black Prince and the bartender told him that everyone knew there had been a lot of raids in the neighborhood and loads of dealers and pimps had gotten taken in. He learned that his second in command, Rottweiler, was dead due to a shootout with police. He found out that his third in command, Poodle, had gotten arrested for the hit and run.

He had nothing. He had no one. People weren’t scared of him anymore. He didn’t have his thugs to back him up. All he had was himself. He would have to start from the basement to build it up again and he couldn’t start for a while because the cops were keeping a special eye on the neighborhood. He fell apart.

He went back to the council estate and I watched him drink himself into a stupor. When he was unconscious, I let myself in and removed most of the surveillance. The only thing left was too small and too unobtrusive to be found by Scotland Yard. I rolled up his left sleeve, sloppily, wrapped the fingers of his right hand around a syringe, placed it against a vein in his left elbow, and used his thumb to press down the plunger. When the syringe was empty, I let his hand go and it fell to the side.

Two minutes later, the drug reached his heart. It didn’t kill him. That would have been too easy. No, it acted like a burst of adrenaline. It woke him from his alcoholic unconsciousness. And it had elements of a hallucinogen. I left and watched on the surveillance as he yelled and swung at invisible opponents, running into furniture and walls. He scratched and clawed at his skin, dislodging the syringe, as he thought things were crawling on him and in him.  I picked this up from his insane babbling.  He started throwing himself against the walls, breaking lamps, climbing on chairs, jumping on tables until one broke under his weight and he fell to the ground, quite obviously breaking his arm. It was sticking through the skin. After ten minutes, he started shaking and then foaming at the mouth before he expired. 

I went back into the flat and laid out some drug mixing paraphernalia in the bathroom, so it looked like he mixed up a cocktail that was lethal. I took great satisfaction in watching that man die and knowing it was a horrific death and that, other than the initial injection, he did it all to himself. 

Like I said, Kingsman made me into a sociopath. And maybe I’ve crossed the line into psychopath at times since I came back. But considering the evil that Dean Baker was responsible for, both in society at large and in my life in particular, I think it was poetic justice.


	5. Episode Five

Now, much of what I did to Dean’s enterprises was hands off on my part. I started the snowballs rolling down the hill and between Scotland Yard and the gang itself, the avalanche occurred. The point of the metaphor is that I had a good bit of free time on my hands. I kept tabs on what was happening with the gang, though various bugs planted in places - like the Black Prince or some flats of gang members - and through hacking of various cameras and computer files at Scotland Yard. _That_ part of my mission no longer required my undivided attention, just brief check-ups and actions, until Dean was out of jail.

Therefore, I used the time to work on other missions. I started with tracking down people on the lists I had been given that were requested to be kept safe. Some of those people were actually the future knight themselves, whether the young ones who weren’t knights yet or older ones who _were_ knights by now. Though, only two of those were still alive when I came back. But several of the knights asked me to make sure their mentors were safe. 

For the younger children and their families it was fairly easy. I simply checked up on them and made sure nothing weird had happened and they were where I was told they would be by their future selves. The knights - that was tricky. I managed it eventually, but it was tricky and tied into my main mission and main side mission.

The hardest part of the keeping people safe missions was to not just find them but make sure they remained safe through what might come to pass. I had the safehouse which I had gotten as not just a place for me to have a bolthole but as an actual _safe_ house for others. 

Daisy was there with Mickey after I got Michelle into involuntary rehab. And it was awesome spending downtime with my little flower. But I needed a way to get people there when the time came, to keep them from any chaos that Valentine caused. 

In the future, Merlin,  _ you  _ Merlin, not the future holder of the title, knew what we were attempting. Or were working on and going to try to figure out and do, or something like that. He actually pointed us - or well the scientific tech wizards working on it - in a new direction that led to an answer to some fairly important issues from what I was told. Anyway, before he died - he knew it was coming and knew I was the one they would send - he gave me a contact, a retired Kingsman knight who I could contact to help me. The knight was long dead by the time I came back but he was still alive now. Merlin, you made it clear what line he wouldn’t cross but that within parameters, and with the info you gave me, if approached for the right reasons, he would provide any help that he could.

So, while I was waiting for Harry to end up in his coma and Dean to get out of jail to see his crumbled empire, I went to Oxford and approached the knight formerly known as Excalibur.

 

Knight Excalibur (retired)

And yes, I actually did it. I found him in a little coffee shop near the center of town. He was nearly holding court among a certain set of students. They were grilling him on military history and strategy. I sat and listened for a while, about an hour, to be honest. It really was incredibly impressive and amazing. His voice, the tone, the cadence, nearly hypnotic. Luckily, I had training, unlike the puppies panting around him. Every last bloody one of them left that pub with firm plans to join up after they finished their degree. 

I was the only one still sitting there when his little lecture ended and his eyes caught mine. After a few moments, the laughter that had previously filled them disappeared and they looked absolutely cold, like dark tunnels in that face. I simply cocked an eyebrow at the old spy and smirked.

He frowned at me and tilted his head towards the car park behind the row of shops. I nodded and rose to my feet. I’m pretty sure he was convinced I was there to assassinate him, his former life coming home to roost, so to speak. But he was going to meet his fate like the true gentleman spy he was. You can take the suit off of a Kingsman, but you can’t take the Kingsman out of a Kingsman. 

We met in that car park, I stood at the end, across from a small wooded area, at a distance from any civilians and he came to me. He didn’t run. I’m sure it didn’t even cross his mind. Class act that one. Absolute bloody class act.

He got within about four feet of me and raised his chin. “Well, lad?”

I smirked at him and shook my head. “Got it all wrong. I’ve got a message but it isn’t the one you seem to think.”

“Enlighten me.”

“The sword may be in its stone, but it needn’t wait for a knight or their king to wield it. The sword can wield itself, if the cause is just and true. A star falls onto the tree and releases the wizard unto his final rest and releasing magic into the world, to heal and to harm.”

Excalibur’s face was priceless. I doubt the old man had been shocked like that in years, if ever. But it only lasted a handful of moments before his still quick brain jumped right to his proper answer.

“The crystal cave shimmers and cracks, the lake bubbles and its lady rises to become a cloud. Armor rusts, scabbards decay, but the heart of a true knight is untouched by time.”

I replied with the final pass phrase that you taught me, “The ravens flee and he comes, the once and future of the country and the world.”

His deep brown eyes closed for a long moment and when he opened them, they were filled with tears that never fell down that face. “When?”

I tilted my head to the right. “Me? Or?”

“Let’s start easy, lad. When did you come from? And let me tell you, I never thought to live to hear those phrases. It was a whim, something the lad and I came up with just before I retired, we had been watching some American movie and he had been ranting about the idiocy of the premise, before musing on how it could be a reality someday. And we were both a little drunk and more than a little nostalgic and we set up the phrase set in case he cracked it and sent someone back in time, if it were ever truly needed.”

I smiled. “He told me that story. He knew where we were aiming to end up and that I would need your help.”

He returned my smile, a little bitter twist to his lips, “So, you came from when, lad?”

“January 2038.”

“So, a long term problem, then. Not a quick fix like stopping a single act. What do you need Excalibur for, Agent?”

“Mordred.”

“Ah.” He closed his eyes and bit his lip, releasing a deep sigh. “I see. How long have you been a knight, Mordred?”

“Since March 2015.”

“And what codename were you given when you _joined_ the Table?”

I grimaced at him, “Mordred.”

“Fuck.”

“Indeed, Excalibur, sir. You have no idea.”

“What do you need me to do, lad? I’m a bit old to assassinate people. Or for a honeypot.” He smiled with a wiggle of his eyebrows. “Not that I’d mind the latter.”

“Sorry, sir. Sadly, no honeypot. Happily, you needn’t kill anyone either.”

“Oh, well. And call me Cal for crying out loud, lad. Excalibur is a mouthful and too odd besides outside certain areas. And sir is just wrong somehow. I suspect we’ll be working together a good bit and you're the one with the knowledge and the mission.”

“Very well, Cal. I have several things in the works. Everything will come to a head one way or another in mid-February 2015. By then, I have a list of people I need to make sure are safe. I have a house and equipment to ensure that those there are safe but I need to get them there. I can’t start moving the majority of them until early February but I need you to get them to the house. Some of them you know, some of them you don’t but I think that voice and talented use of it should work just fine. And I won’t be able to help much. At that point events will be spiraling fast and will need my constant attention and often, my actual presence.”

He pursed his mouth for a full minute before nodding. “The knights from 2038 asked you to keep their families safe.”

I nodded. “And themselves and their mentors for the younger knights, among others. I have a list from Arthur of another kind, but I can handle that myself. I need your help to keep safe the future of Kingsman. As you always have.”

He nodded solemnly. “You have a recruit, Mordred.”

I bit my lip and looked at him from the corner of my eye. “Eggsy,” I whispered. “At least, when it’s just us. I haven’t heard that in a long time and I may never hear it again. Please.”

“I understand. There’s no one left alive who recalls my birth name. I don’t think I’d even be able to remember to answer to it. Eggsy it is when it is just us, lad.” He laid a hand on my shoulder and we just stood there for a few minutes, lost in thought. It was nice.

Cal took me to his house and we spent several hours going over the lists that I needed his help with and the plans to keep them safe. He had some very helpful ideas, which was of course one of the points that made me go to him in the first place. He is brilliant and Merlin knew I would be able to use that brilliance to accomplish my mission.

After Cal made me a splendid curried chicken for dinner, and no takeaway for him, totally from scratch, I went back to the safehouse and looked over Arthur’s second list. It wasn’t too much, or too difficult. It only had 14 names on it. People who absolutely could not be allowed to live whether the rest of my mission succeeded or failed. 

I did a bit of electronic recognizance and determined that all of them were in place where they had been in the first timeline. And I came up with an absolutely brilliant idea on how to deal with them. I couldn’t have fourteen people die in assassinations. Or even fourteen bizarre accidents, mixed with a random murder or two and a staged suicide. Not people of the profile that most of those on the list had. It would draw too much notice, likely even from Kingsman, not something I could afford. But my idea, so simple in scope and so relatively simple to implement, would draw no notice. 

So I worked on my strategy for each name, they would all be essentially the same but tailored to each. I used the various street surveillance systems to track their movements for a week and then I acted. I decided to have a little fun with myself and test myself at the same time. Each mark was required to be completed within a 24 hour period of the previous one and the entire list had to be complete in a fortnight. It worked, too.

No mysterious dead bodies or disappearances, though granted to the public and the authorities, disappearances would have just gotten swept into the load of kidnappings that Valentine was undertaking. But 14 being reported that _he_ had nothing to do with, would have caught _his_ attention and brought _his_ scrutiny to bear, not something I desired.

So, no bodies, no vanished people, but not one of them would survive whatever came of my mission. They would all die at the same time but by then, no one would notice particularly. Or if they did, it would be too late to impact my mission. 

So, Arthur's lists were out of the way, and the safety lists were in the hands of someone competent and available to assist. Dean was still in jail for a few more weeks, his empire was nearly completely decimated, and according to the news reports of a terrorist bombing at the college, Harry had just made his overly confronting meeting with Professor Arnold and was in a coma at Kingsman HQ.

It was time for me to return my attention to my primary Kingsman mission and my primary personal mission. In this area, they overlapped. 

My first stop was the stately home of a king. Chester King, the current holder of the Arthur title within Kingsman.

It actually surprised me a lot how little security beyond the basics that he had. He was the head of an international spy agency but most of his security was from fucking ADT. It made it tons easier than I thought to break in, the few other security measures he had set up that weren’t from a public security company were easily dealt with by the future tech I brought with me. 

I know that the next Arthur had much more stringent security, I helped test it after Merlin installed it, so I know how good it was. But Chester was - I don’t even know - I guess he was blind to the possibility of work following him home. I don’t think he even contemplated the fact that someone could trace Kingsman and discover his place in it. Or even the possibility of a disgruntled former knight candidate, tech department member, or even a proper knight who went round the bend taking their beef to his home. So superior, Chester. 

Well, his lack of sense or paranoia made my job absurdly simple. I had allotted two hours to crack the security on his house. It took me ten minutes and most of that was  _ after _ I was inside. All of the Kingsman security was in his home office. I could have broken in past the commercially available alarm system and planted bombs all over the house and left without ever even _approaching_ the Kingsman systems. It was bloody ridiculous! He was more worried about a cracksman stealing his silver than assassins blowing him up. Wanker.

I broke in, with extreme ease, and made my way to his bedroom after disabling the Kingsman security in his office, just in case. He was sound asleep, mouth open and snoring like a lumberjack’s saw. I slipped up to his bedside and easily injected a strong sedative, the dose would keep him unconscious for at least 18 hours and he would wake up feeling disoriented and sick to his stomach. He would have the last several hours before he went to bed blacked out in his memory. Basically, he would think he had the influenza or something and his high fever, another symptom though it only lasted for a few hours after the sedative wore off, had caused him to be delirious.

It is much less suspicious than the basic amnesia dart we use in the watch. But the lowest dose available is 6 hours of unconsciousness.Compared to about ten minutes with the amnesia dart, there’s a time and place for both. But I needed Chester to be out of the way for quite some time. I broke in at nearly two in the morning and used the sedative before three. It would keep him home in his bed for the entire day.

The next step was my disguise. I used my computer - in my watch - to scan Chester’s face and body, with particular attention paid to the hands, face and eyes. I then donned a bodysuit that was basically made of nanites and included a full headsman’s hood. The nanties then interfaced with the computer files and used a combination of solid state holography and actual construction to change my suit to look exactly like Chester. It even adjusted for the difference in our heights. Granted, it is easier for it to add inches than to take them away but either can be done.

This technology was developed by Kingsman tech after nanotech was developed. It was the perfect way to get around biometric security. Most knights wore a skintight biosuit under their bulletproof suit with a hood that stored flatly down the back to be pulled up as needed. It took some getting used to but after a few hours, it isn’t as weird. At one point the tech department was working on integrating the idea into the fabric of the outer suit but it wasn’t easy since the Kingsman suits aren’t skin tight. And the project was abandoned after - well, when it wasn’t a priority anymore.

It took ten minutes for the change to be complete and then I looked identical to Chester King. In the future, Kingsman HQ and the tailor shop were outfitted with sensors to recognize the use of nanotech and disable it at a command but in this time, it was undetectable as long as my acting held up.

I waited easily in the house’s den for the hour that Chester typically left for the shop. I’d been keeping an eye on his schedule and knew his routine, another flaw from the mighty king of the Round Table. Routines are deadly for anyone with enemies.

Well, it helped me in the end, so I ignored the idiocy of the move. I got in the cab that always took the old man to work and watched through his glasses as the screen showed various updates on missions. I accessed the feed into the infirmary room where Harry was, just to check that I had the timing correct and he hadn’t yet woken up. He was laying in that bed, hooked up to several machines, scruff just coming in on his face. Then, to cover my tracks I accessed several other mission files on various knights around the world.

When I arrived at the shop, I went up to the conference room, and it still bugs me to this day that the damn table is oblong and rectangular and not round. Kingsman was based on Arthur and the knights of the fucking  _ round _ table. But I guess wankers like Chester wanted to make it clear they were in charge, unlike the original Arthur who wanted to show that no knight - even him - was above another in that place.

Before I came back, the table we used as a conference table _was_ actually round. It had been that way for over a decade. It really brought things home, somehow, the first time we used it. We all felt it, the history and near magic inherent in what we were and what we did. We felt the echoes of the first knights, the original Arthur of Pendragon, Lancelot du Lac, Bruin the Black, Gawain the Perfect, Galahad the Lion, Merlin Ambrosius. It made things different. Easier and yet harder at the same time. The pressure of the history of those names sat hard on us after that change. I’ll tell you, holding the name Mordred was at times very difficult under that weight of its bloody history.

Well, that's what we did. When I got into the conference room, I wandered around it laying my hand on the walls occasionally as if a bit unsteady. I was working on the idea of Chester’s sickness but also placing advanced surveillance equipment which wouldn’t be detected by Kingsman current bug sweepers. There were cameras and mics with their own internal networks. I am not clear on how it worked but it did. Then after a brief stop in Arthur’s shop office, to do the same I went to the bullet train to HQ. 

Once there I proceeded to several places of importance, starting with Chester’s office, the recruit dorm, the firing range, the dining area, and finally made my way to the medical wing and Harry’s comatose body. To everyone who looked, I was simply doing a fairly routine inspection. Granted, from things I was told Chester wasn’t as diligent about it as former Arthurs had been - the laziest of whom tended to do it at least once every two months - but I also knew from the records I had accessed in the cab that Chester’s last one had been over a year prior, so it was overdue even for him.

When I got to Harry’s room, I stood at the foot of the bed and just watched him for a few minutes. It was the first time seeing him up close and in person for decades for me. He had always been very important to me and we had parted on absolutely foul terms. It always bugged me, haunted me, frankly. But I knew it would look like Arthur granting his presence to one of his finest agents, not overly suspicious. I looked at Harry’s chart briefly and when I turned to go, I took a pratfall into the wall where the screen was and planted surveillance as I pushed myself up. Then I made my way along the bed and laid my hand on Harry’s shoulder, as if in support and kingly benediction, my head bowed as my hand gripped the comatose man beneath it. In reality, my ring was injecting a nano tracker and limited range bug into his bloodstream. After he woke, as events began to move faster, I would need very accurate information on his whereabouts and activities in order to pull off my main missions, Kingsman and personal.  _ Especially  _ the personal. 

I then made my way, occasionally stumbling towards where I knew, according to the glasses feed, that Merlin was. When I arrived I spent some time making small talk until things lined up for my purposes. And it was a chance to use my skill at mimicry. 

I’ve always been good at using other voices and after I became a knight that talent was honed to razor sharpness. And I had known this was one voice I would need to have down pat before they even finished the machine. I spent months listening to Chester King’s voice in many situations, watching video feeds, learning his tone and mannerisms. And I wanted to test all of my hard work. Plus, well, it was a mission parameter. So it wasn’t just me being cocky.

“Merlin.” I approached him as he stood on the terrace overlooking part of the training course. 

“Arthur, sir.” As he acknowledged me, though with the wrong identity, I shifted to partially seem to lean against the balustrade as I turned to watch the recruits.

“How are the recruits doing?”

Merlin gazed at me impassively. “Early days, sir. But some have promise. I don’t play favorites, sir, and I can always be surprised. But I believe the crop is overall well chosen.”

“And the  _ legacy  _ candidate of Galahad’s?” I put a twist on the word legacy, allowing my mouth to assume a brief sour look and my nose to tilt up the slightest bit as if catching a whiff of a repulsive scent. “Is the boy any good or is our Galahad simply tilting at his windmills again?”

Merlin blinked and his jaw clenched for a moment, something I took great pride in eliciting from the controlled handler. The clench only lasted the briefest of moments and I’m not sure the real Chester would have even noticed, at least not by the time he was in his position then, but still I’ve always loved provoking an emotional physical response from our stoic Scot ever since he told me to come whisper in his ear after the parachute test.

“Galahad’s proposal is doing quite well, sir. He was the only one to look for an escape route during the water test and managed to hold his breath for over three minutes while he broke the two way mirror.”

I nodded my head once. “Hmm. Yes, well, I’m sure he had plenty of experience with those mirrors, not something the other proposals would likely have.”

I admit, I was channeling Charlie in that moment. It was an echo of something he actually said in Merlin’s hearing after the test. But since that little wanker was the proposal of the _old_ wanker, it fit the conversation perfectly.

Merlin’s lips pursed, and I could swear I would see blood when he opened his mouth to reply from where he was obviously biting his tongue to hold back his instinctive reaction to such blatant classism. And against the son of the man who had saved not only Harry’s life but his own. I admit it, I love pushing buttons. And Merlin’s buttons on this issue were very well known to me.

“That is a may be, sir. Although, I do feel the need to correct you. Five of the recruits, other than Eggsy, have been arrested and spent time in a jail of one sort or another. Two of them were military jails, for drunk and disorderly. The other three were civilian jails. One of them was for solicitation of a prostitute. One was for shoplifting over 800£ of goods during a riot. And the last was picked up for possession of over half a dozen tabs of the street drugs Ecstasy, Special K, and LSD. That was young Charles Hesketh, the last one, sir. So, Eggsy is in company of several who would have knowledge firsthand of the two way mirrors and frankly, with the prevalence of law procedural shows on the telly, the others should have used their brains to see the mirror as more than a vanity. They should have realized they would be watched and that entire wall was the mirror. But only Eggsy picked up on it, or at least put it together under pressure. It was an impressive display of skills. He has potential. Which isn’t to say he will live up to it. All of the proposals have potential, the question becomes during training, can they handle what we throw at them.”

I grimaced. “I have faith the  _ right  _ candidate will win through in the end, Merlin.”

Of course, I  _ meant  _ Roxy, who more than earned it in my timeline. But coming out of Chester’s mouth and face I’m sure Merlin took it to mean Charlie or someone similarly placed. In other words, anyone but Harry’s charity case. 

“I’m sure the best proposal will prevail, sir. The tests are designed to insure it, after all.”

“Hmmm.” I not so discreetly leaned forward on the balustrade seemingly looking over the approaching crowd of young adults and their dogs. Merlin narrowed his eyes at me but turned to face his responsibilities. 

“Very good. All but Rufus. You owe me another lap, boy, for your back chat this morning. Double time! Everyone else, dismissed back to the dorm.” the recruits began to make their way up the steps of the terrace. 

I recalled this moment. Merlin approached Eggsy to ask him about a bit of JB’s training and an altercation earlier that day with Digby’s dog. I stood where I had been when Merlin excused himself to me and watched, waiting for the perfect moment. 

When the two were nearly done their conversation, I approached them. As I came within arm’s reach of the two men, I allowed my knees to buckle and I stumbled. Eggsy reached out to catch me, a bit of a surprise but so totally in character for my younger self. Merlin reached forward and laid his hand on my forehead. To him, I felt fevered with damp skin, a pre-programmed bit of physical alteration by the nanotech. My face was flushed and I was inducing fine trembles to run through my body. 

“Sir. You’re ill. Let me get you a car to take you home.”

“Nonsense, Merlin,” I nearly snarled as I pulled away from Eggsy’s hold only to nearly fall over. “I’m just a bit dizzy.”

“No, sir. You’re fevered. Eggsy, help me get him around to the front drive. There’s a nasty influenza in London and its surrounds at the moment and it isn’t surprising you’ve caught it considering how much time you spend at the shop. You just need a few days rest, sir. I’ll send a medic around later this evening, once you’re settled back at home.”

Merlin obviously knew, just as everyone who knew him at all on a personal level, that Chester despised having to stay in the infirmary at HQ. He would have made serious problems if he was required to stay there for something so simple as a bug. I had counted on it.

Eggsy slid under my left arm and partially hoisted me onto his shoulders. As my hand brushed across the nape of his neck, I allowed the ring’s plunger to inject the tracker and bug into his bloodstream. If he even felt anything - which he shouldn't have since the tip is dipped in a numbing agent - he didn’t make anything of it. 

As Merlin started to take his place under my right arm, I twisted as if starting to pass out and pushed him into the balustrade. He hit with a loud release of air and grunt. Eggsy twisted to grab me around the waist and my left arm came up to grasp at Merlin as it came off of his shoulders. I shook my head, as if trying to escape the dizzy spell and pushed off of Merlin to try to stand upright. As I did, my left hand, with the ring upon it, was able to brush over his inner wrist, releasing its nanotech into his body. 

Finally, Eggsy got situated under my left arm and Merlin at my right and we made our way slowly around the terrace to the front drive. I’m sure to anyone watching, it looked like the most ridiculous bit of comedy but for me it was  deadly serious. Maybe we could see if there’s any video surveillance footage of the moment. It could be priceless. And used to train agents, see if they can spot my deception on their first viewing. Then slow it down to show my actions, natural _looking_ though they were anything but.

Merlin and Eggsy helped me into the Kingsman cab and Merlin instructed the driver to see me home before he wished me well and shut the door. I laid my head back against the rear headrest and closed my eyes. I’m sure the driver thought that I had fallen asleep. 

I spent the somewhat lengthy drive reviewing my plans and feeling smugly satisfied at how well my mission had gone that day. I had passed myself off as Chester King and no one had seemed to notice anything off. Not even Merlin. But I was glad that Harry was unconscious. It had been a while since Merlin had been a field agent and relied on his tech to help pick up on cues. Harry might have noticed minute things off in my portrayal. Plus, it would have been exceedingly difficult to fool Harry enough to be able to inject him if he wasn’t in a coma.

When we arrived at Chester's home, I allowed the driver to “wake” me and help me up the steps. Once inside I dismissed him and when I was sure he was gone, I made my way to Chester’s bedroom and his unconscious body. I injected the tracker and bug into him and then, I felt the absolute need to check on his truthfulness. 

He had told me that Valentine had gotten to him after Harry had met with him. But I had never been sure. Neither had the rest of the knights nor Merlin. Many of them found the previous Lancelot’s death extremely suspicious. And Chester blaming everything on Harry, well it was convenient. So I reached my hand forward and ran my fingers behind his ear and along the smooth skin of his neck on the right side, then the left, just to be sure. It astounded me that he _had_ been truthful. Evidently, Valentine hadn’t even been sure Lancelot was something other than an independent operator, until Harry went blazing into on his so Gryffindor idea of a confrontation with Professor Arnold, talking about his colleague. Not friend, not brother or something that could have been spun, but _colleague_. Thus starting Valentine on his quest to find this agency that was meddling in his business. 

I cursed the old man, having hoped that he had already been turned and that there had been a grand conspiracy within Kingsman with him as its head that had begun long before. Alas, he was clean at the moment, just your average classist wanker.

I left the bedroom and sent the signal to the nanotech to disengage. Three minutes later I slid the hood back into the back of my jumpsuit and donned my casual gear, slipped out of the back door and across the garden to the alley and walked three blocks to my car.


	6. Episode Six

So, I had an in on multiple levels at Kingsman. I had hacked the security system through the terminals in Chester’s office at the shop and I had planted the tracker bugs in most of the main players, at least those I had physical access to. It would have been sweet to have tracker bugs in Valentine and Gazelle but I didn't have that opportunity. 

So, time passed, as it is wont to do. Excalibur and I worked on the safety lists, I played with Daisy during my downtime, I completed my revenge against Dean as I told you. Harry finally woke up from his lengthy beauty sleep. the proposals were slowly winnowed down to six and after the plane test, it became three. Merlin found the signal from Professor Arnold’s head explosion, Eggsy revealed Valentine’s announcement of free sim cards which led to free internet and cell service, for everyone, forever. Harry pointed out the scar on Valentine's’ assistant and went off to have a tete a tete with the billionaire.

That actually provided me with an opportunity. It wasn’t a foolproof one but there was potential and it wouldn't hurt anything if it didn’t work. I contacted the nanotech within Harry’s bloodstream before he left the country and input timed instructions. I knew when he and Valentine would be meeting and I instructed them that once that time arrived to duplicate and enter anyone when skin on skin contact was made, like a handshake. If it worked, the nanotech would be in Valentine and maybe even Gazelle. If it didn’t, no harm, no foul, they would only be programmed to do this for half an hour. And I knew that the gala Harry expected would be a one on one with the man himself instead.

The nanotech is incredibly small and sophisticated. But they are programmed for safety. They will only replicate to a certain level in a body and then they won’t. Outside of the bloodstream, they break into their component parts within six hours. Our researchers were mostly geeks, even _now_ , the tech division can be described so. They had seen the movies and the TV shows. They read the books. They had no desire to create an AI that could take over the world and see humans as the enemy. They created _multiple_ failsafes into all of the AI systems that they made. 

The nanotech trackers can’t break skin on their own. They can only enter the body through a hole. Thus, the scratch by the ring. Picking up some via skin on skin contact, especially very brief, basic contact such as a handshake, the nanos have six hours to get into the bloodstream by finding a cut or sore or somewhere they can be absorbed through thin walls. Once in the bloodstream, they reproduce and head for the ear canal and the voice box and mouth, first, for the bugging purposes. Others make their way through the system into the bone marrow. That takes a good while but it keeps them from being taken in a blood draw. I really don’t understand the specifics of  _ how _ they work but they do work. 

Though in this situation, as I listened to Harry arrive at the gala turned one on one dinner, I discovered that it wouldn’t work this time. Valentine didn’t shake Harry’s hand. It was fun to listen to their banter but frankly it disturbed me how cavalierly Harry was treating the situation. I know there was no way he could have attacked but Harry didn’t seem to be taking Valentine seriously. The man has always been a genius. He is self-made. He came up from practically nothing to build a multi-billion dollar tech empire. He was no Bond villain sitting back stroking a cat and letting his idiot minions handle things for him. He was smart, and not just in research but street smart. And Harry underestimated him in that meeting. He had been made. And I could hear in Harry’s voice that he knew it but - yes, Harry, I’m sure he knew that you knew that he knew.  

But you didn’t think that he was prepared. Your cover story was frankly, flimsy. A suddenly unknown billionaire appearing out of thin air? Giving money to a foundation he had nearly abandoned? Quoting  _ Professor Arnold _ , for fuck’s sake?!?

You led him right to Kingsman after that dinner. He had been trying to find out who Lancelot was when you paid your visit to Arnold. Until then, I learned in the original timeline, he had been thinking that Lancelot was freelance. No one knew him and he had been asking  _ everyone _ . Then you confronted the professor and gave yourself and Lancelot away as colleagues. That meant it was bigger than a single man. Valentine knew an agency of some sort, ultra secret, was on his trail. And here’s something you geniuses didn’t even think about  _ either _ time around: You had to know after Arnold’s head blew up when he was about to say something that he was bugged. Even if you didn’t know at the time _who_ bugged him for sure, you knew they had killed to keep themselves and their plans a secret. And they had at least audio, if not video of Harry. His voice, possibly his face, was in the hands of the professor’s kidnapper turned murderer. And yet, Harry went in undercover when you traced things to Valentine himself. One of the dumbest moves for a smart agent I’ve ever seen. You just totally bought into classism in that moment, Harry. Valentine was just a tech guy, from poverty, he could never beat you, you were a Kingsman! Stupid.

Anyway, the nanotech didn’t have a chance to get to Valentine’s skin, so that idea went nowhere. I still didn’t have an in on that front. But I had done lots of work elsewise on Valentine's corporation, so I wasn’t too worried.

I did get trackers - without the bugs - into everyone of the safe listers over the next several months so that Cal and I could know exactly where they were if and when the time came to pick them up. 

Thirty-six hours after Harry’s dinner at Valentine’s mansion, my bugs in the conference room at the shop picked up a meeting between the billionaire and Chester. Valentine convinced him and frankly, it wasn’t a hard sell for the classist bastard to turn. And it happened because Harry was sloppy and led them to the shop when he reported in.

Well, I spent the next little while listening to Harry try to figure out Valentine’s connection to the church; Eggsy get thrown from a plane then later, get tied to train tracks and deny Harry and Kingsman even existed; and Chester get implanted with a chip like the professor and then carefully sound out the knights and other staff. He turned a fair few of them, too. That’s one problem with an  _ independent _ organization. No oversight. 

Then I listened to Eggsy go home with Harry for 24 hours. The lessons on being a gentleman, making a proper martini, the Sun front pages, it was nostalgic for me. And then I listened to them exploring the armory at the tailor shop. Oxfords, always Oxfords.  _ Never  _ brogues. The poison shoes, the poison pen, the grenade lighter. I’ve used them all over the years. 

And as Eggsy was raising an arm to the sky like a Nazi to Hitler, I recalled what would happen next and I sent an urgent signal to his nanotech to start reproducing and get ready to transfer upon skin contact. And the two left the fitting room armory, no cherry popping involved, and ran into Valentine in the main shop area. There was more banter back and forth between the two men and Harry mentioned he was showing his valet around. 

And Valentine did to _Eggsy_ what he _never_ had to Harry, he shook his hand! Success! Reverse classism. Eggsy was in his chav wear, looking like someone Valentine could relate to from his past, thus he was worthy of a handshake from the self made billionaire. Plus, I’m pretty sure he thought that valet was a  _ code word _ for lover. He knew Harry didn’t need a bodyguard but he equated Eggsy’s position in relation to Harry with Gazelle’s to him. I heard that later when the nanotech bugs began transmitting.

I knew most of Valentine’s plans already but I kept an ear on him anyway, to make sure he didn’t throw me any curve balls at the last minute. I remember those last few weeks leading up to the dog test taking forever but they didn’t in reality. Not this time around. As mid-February approached and I listened to Eggsy come to the end of his job interview, Cal and I were getting things ready to move. He had approached many of the list and gotten them to agree to come to the house in various ways I didn’t totally micromanage or pay much attention to. He was soon going to be completely on his own. In the last 48 hours or so leading up to the moment, I would be feet on the ground, on the scene, in order to meet both Kingsman’s goals and my own.

There was only one set that I felt the need to get on my own and as Eggsy spent the night at Harry’s house, learning to make a non-Bond martini, I put my plan into effect. I called Jamal and slipped fairly easily back into my old cadences and speech patterns. This was the only way I could come up with to save my childhood best friends. They wouldn’t have gone with Cal. It just wouldn’t have worked. But _Eggsy_ , yeah, him they would trust. I couldn’t approach them face to face obviously but over the phone, with a good cover story, I hoped it would work.

“H’lo?” Jamal sounded tired but happy. And yes, I know it was only one word but I knew him well.

“Hey, mate. ‘S’Eggsy.”

“Eggsy! Mate, where ya bin? Ya wouldn’t believe the shit’s gone down round here. Ya bin layin’ low? Hidin’ from yer stepdad’s crew? Ya don’t gotta anymore, mate. Poodle’s in jail, fer a long time and Rottie got his self shot by the bobbies. He’s dead. And yer step dad, he was in jail fer a while and then when he got out, he OD’d, Eggsy. He’s dead. And yer mum, she disappeared. Word is she’s in rehab. The baby got taken by someone, kids services, I’d guess. So, ya can come outta hidin’.”

“Nah, Jamal. The cops gave me like a jail alternative thing, trying to keep t’light offenders outta jails and turn their lives around and all. It’s like a military camp work release thing. I just can’t leave by choice. Not yet, anyways. But there’s some stuff here, some guys, in like suits that are big high ups somewhere. And they know shit, like weird shit, man. Like weird  _ London _ shit, ya know?”

“ _ London  _ shit? Like that weird alien shit that no one talks about and kinda forgets about?”

“Yeah, mate. So, listen, Jamal. Somefin  _ big’s  _ comin’, like worldwide fucked up shit humanity might die out or somefin’ shit. I shouldn’t know about it but well, one o’ the suits likes me. He likes snark, ya know. Says I’m a little shit but I got potential. So, he tole me a bit. And I can’t tell ya much ‘cause well, he’d kill me, like me or not, like I’d tell ya but I’d have to kill you level of fucked up shit headed this way, J. So, there’s this safehouse. It ain’t far. But this bloke, Mordred, he sent some folks there. And Daisy, she’s already there. And it’s the best bet fer you. And Ryan and yer girl. Take whoever ya can from yer families and go there. Seriously, Jamal. This is like life or death, literally. You and Ryan, you bin there fer me fer so long, hidin’ me when ya could, patchin’ me up, just listenin’ and all. I can’t just let you face it wifout warnin’. And I couldn’t just take you and Ryan. Ya’d hate me ferever. If I saved you but not yer girl and yer families. So, get there, a’right? I gotta go, like real soon. If he catches me, I’m so fucked. And not in a fun way. Within the next 20 hours, max, get to the house, ya gotta drive but please, mate. Keep safe, yeah.”

I could actually hear Jamal nodding, he was doing it so hard. “Got it, Eggsy.”

“And everyone should leave their cellphones at home. Ya won’t need ‘em. Just leave ‘em behind. Everybody. And I shouldn’t even have said that much.”

Jamal sighed deeply and his breath hitched. He always was the smartest of the three of us. I knew he picked up on the hint and would probably put a scant few ideas together, though likely wild in the theory area. “We will, Eggsy. And Eggsy?”

“Yeah, J?”

“Thanks, mate. Really.”

“Yer welcome. Jist - keep safe and keep an eye on the flower, huh?”

“Sure thing. See you after the apoc - um - when you get out of jail alternative.”

“See ya, mate.”

I hung up the phone and hoped he could get those he cared about to go. I knew at the minimum he’d get his girl - and for the life of me I can’t remember her name - and Ryan. Ryan would trust me and Jamal’s girl would trust him. I hoped Jamal’s parents and Ryan’s mum and sister would come, too. And if Jamal’s two older brothers were in town, them too. But I had done what I could. I knew I couldn’t keep everyone I had once known who deserved it safe. But some of them. Yes. That I could try to do.

I let Cal know what I had done and he understood. Then I spent the evening playing with my little sister. It was February 12 and I knew the next 48 hours or so would be insane. I needed to settle my mind. Everything was coming to a head and I could barely focus with the worries. So, I just put it aside and indulged a toddler. 

The next day was when I finally got the tracker bugs into Valentine, thanks to his handshake with Eggsy and then I had the distinct displeasure of listening to Chester King give Eggsy the order to shoot JB.

I remember my thoughts as I stood there, once upon a time in an now obliterated timeline, my gun pointing at the trusting face of my pug. He was innocent and trusted me completely. I thought about my mum and Daisy and Dean, the vicious bastard who had hurt us so much. I remembered my many internal vows to not be anything like him. I thought of Harry and his expectations, his faith in me and my potential. I thought about Arthur as he waited, knowing he wanted me to fail, hoped I wouldn’t do it. The test was fucked up. I wasn’t sure if it was real. Many of the tests had been faked in some way. And I tightened my finger minisculely on the trigger when my dad’s face floated through my mind. He wasn’t a knight when he died. He was training. I know now that he passed this stage and was on an actual mission when he died. But I didn’t know that then. And I just couldn’t take the chance. I refused to become Dean. I wouldn’t betray someone who was supposed to be my partner, the one who was gifted to me to teach about teamwork and protecting the weak. I refused. And Arthur gloated until I turned the gun on him, aiming in right between the eyes. Then I left. Or, rather, Eggsy left. I listened to Eggsy leave, stealing Chester’s car on the way.

And I gathered up my own kit, shook Cal’s hand and kissed Daisy on the head. Then I walked out to my car and with the feed from Eggsy in my ear, I left the safe house, ready to proceed to my next step once I was sure it was going down the same way. I heard Eggsy getting changed at the flat, voice confused as he looked around the messed up rooms. I heard him get to the Black Prince in the cab only to curse as the car started moving on its own. I listened to his fight with Harry and tuned into Harry’s feed to listen to Merlin’s report. It was the same. Merlin believed Valentine would be at the South Glade Mission Church to do something bad. And Harry would be going there to stop him.

I was already at the airport, the private jet I had purchased months before ready to go for just this moment. I filed my flight plans and was on my way to Kentucky before Harry even reached Kingsman HQ.

Now, I had viewed the videos from Galahad’s mission to Kentucky numerous times. It was essential to know exactly what he did and when if I was going to stop him from a martyr’s death. The one thing, an absolutely _perfect_ point, was that he didn’t put on his glasses until he was in the car on the way to the church. I knew when he landed and the route he took to the waiting car and I had a brief window to act on my first plan. If anything had shifted in his outlook and he had decided to wear his glasses on the plane, I would have to improvise on my secondary or even tertiary plan. But  Harry was a creature of habit and I knew he disliked wearing the glasses while on the plane unless he needed to view files. But there were no files that he wasn’t already familiar with for this mission. He knew everything Kingsman knew about Valentine - except of course for Arthur’s treachery - and since his dinner with the billionaire he had learned everything there was to know about the church. So, it was most likely that his glasses would remain in his pocket as they had the first time. 

I took my place for my plan as Harry’s jet taxied to the designated disembarkation area. I glanced through a window and saw him exit the jet and smiled. He was barefaced. My first plan should work. I pulled a cell phone from my pocket and as he walked down the deserted hallway, I began approaching him, my head down and focused on the screen, seemingly a business man, muttering under his breath about a deal going wrong. 

Harry saw my preoccupation because he slid to the side as we neared one another. But that wasn’t on. As we were about to pass, my shoe caught on a bit of raised carpet, deliberately done minutes earlier, and I slipped. The phone went flying and just missed hitting Harry in the head. And that was deliberate. I knew he would dodge it. But I went flying backwards and sideways, striking my head against the wall. I wasn’t actually injured but the loud crack I made sure to cause made it seem so. 

Harry, being the gentleman that he is, picked up my tossed phone, glancing it over to be sure it wasn’t a bomb or something, I suppose, as I watched from beneath my half closed lids. Seeing it was just a somewhat high end phone - a correct evaluation on his part as the phone was a decoy - he slipped it into his pocket and approached the downed businessman that I appeared to be. He was wary, staying out of reach of any sudden movements but not suspicious enough to ignore the civilian he thought that I was.

“Sir, are you quite alright?”

“Ugh,” I moaned, lifting a hand to my head. I continued in a Midwestern American accent. “This just is not my week.”

I caught the smile as it crossed Harry’s face. “Indeed?”

“Yeah. I’m on my way to New York. There’s a multi-million dollar deal about to crash and burn if I don’t get the idiots who work for me back on the right track and now I take a full on tackle into a wall. God!”

“Can I assist you? Take you to the medical station perhaps?”

I shook my head gingerly. “No, it isn’t too bad. I think I’m just gonna sit here for a bit. I really have to catch my plane on time. It won’t leave without me, it’s a private jet, but I have appointments I _cannot_ miss once I touch down.”

“Very well.” After my dismissal of help, I can practically see the last of the suspicion drain from Harry’s features. It was a bit disappointing, in a way. I wanted my plan to work but Harry had always been the super spy, my mentor, high on a pedestal, even now. And to see him fall for my trick was upsetting.

I pat the area on the floor around me, looking around. “Did you see where my phone went, though? Might as well get some emails sent until I feel steady enough to get up.”

Harry nodded and pulled it from his pocket. He stepped closer and held it out. “It nearly hit me in the head before it hit the opposite wall. I don’t believe it is broken, however.”

“Thanks, man.” I reached out to take the phone and brushed my fingers over his palm as I did. It was a natural move, especially for someone who wasn’t completely steady. I don’t think Harry even found anything odd in the movement. I took the phone and smiled as Harry been me good luck and turned to continue down the hall.

He got five steps when he simply collapsed. There was no warning, no sudden lurching, no time to cast a look of betrayal or shock my way. He simply fell to the floor between one step and the next, the sleep agent I had coated his palm with taking hold.

I got to my feet easily and lifted him as if he was drunk and I was assisting him to out car. The small private terminal was nearly empty anyway and no one even gave a glance to us. I laid him on the back seat of his own waiting car and drove us to a pre-arranged area where I had a small cargo truck waiting.

I carried him to the back and closed the cargo door. I lit several LED lanterns and got to work. I stripped Harry down to his smalls, appropriated his weapons stash and placed his glasses on a nearby shelf to get them out of the way. Then I used my watch to scan his face, head, and neck. I didn’t need the whole body disguise and considering what I believed was about to happen, being in such a disguise would have hindered my responses. 

Once the program was done running, I arranged Harry into a comfortable position, compete with a pillow under his head and a blanket over him, injected him with a long lasting sedative that had no appreciable side effects - unlike the flu inducer - and donned his suit and shoes, packing the weapons away for easy access.

I made my way to the car, the truck locked and parked in a lot far from others, between two abandoned warehouses. Once I was on the main road near the church, I donned the glasses, just as Harry had done in the original timeline and heard Merlin’s voice in my ear. “ _ About damn time you checked in Galahad. _ ”

I had memorized this conversation, brief as it was, from the old recordings and so parroted my line, “There was no need for you to watch me sleep on the plane, Merlin. But now, I am just a few miles from the church and so, here you are, as well.”

“ _ Yes, and thank you for not encrypting the feed this time _ .”

“I could use your real time assistance so there was no point as you would be recording and monitoring regardless.”

“ _ True. Never stopped you before, but true. _ ”

“I am approaching the lot for this wonderful house of worship. I won’t be able to reply much once I am inside, obviously, but I’ll keep the comms open. Just don’t interject too much. I need to keep focused.”

“ _ Understood, Galahad. _ ”

It wasn’t long until I had parked near the church and gone inside, sliding two pieces of tech into my ears before I exited the vehicle. I knew where Harry had taken a seat in the original timeline and I wasn’t about to disrupt things even though I felt the location was a poor one. It was on the righthand side and only a few pews away from the front of the area, between several parishioners. I would have chosen a seat in the rear of the sanctuary or at least near the side exit. And I would most definitely have not allowed myself to have been hemmed in. You should have taken a aisle seat, Harry. 

You didn’t know what was going to go down - unlike me - but you knew the reputation of this church, their main hatreds, and you had to know they would never have invited Valentine there, no matter _how_ rich he was. The only thing they would have seen was the color of his skin. So, it should have been obvious that he was unlikely to show up in person. There was something about this that just stripped the deep thought processes from you two. You’d probably say it isn’t fair. I’m looking at this through a lens of knowing the outcome. But it is all logic and I even thought it odd that you were expecting Valentine to walk into that church and listen to a sermon yelling about niggers as I was watching the live feed in Harry’s office the _first_ time around.

But I sat in the same place, with the blond woman of my left and a row of other hate mongers on my right. I listened to the service, sang the hymns softly as they were expected and then listened to the hate filled sermon coming from the “man of God” at the front of the church. Ranting on about abortion and Jews and the government. 

I heard Merlin in my ear, “ _ Charming sermon. Can you see Valentine anywhere? _ ”

I looked around the sanctuary, homing in on a surveillance camera on the wall. I knew Valentine wasn’t in the church and this was the clue in the original timeline that showed Harry and Merlin the same.

Then having seen that and the preacher hitting one of Harry’s hot buttons - or that is what I always thought every time I saw it, I followed the script of the first time line and attempted to excuse myself to the lady on my left. 

Oh, you want to know what I thought the trigger word was, Eggsy? He sat there through numerous rants on so many groups and then the pastor practically screams “fag lover” in the middle of a long listed rant of others that the pastor and his flock hated. I think if Harry had seen that camera a few minutes before he would have simply excused himself and when questioned have asked the location of the restroom. But after _that_? Just like after Poodle’s quip about rent boys on Smith Street, Harry’s snark came out and when the woman wouldn’t just let him by - well, he couldn’t let it be well enough.

I memorized his little sarcasm snark fest because I knew she would be on the left and would question my trying to leave. I was a stranger, in a nice, fancy suit and she was suspicious of me. Of Harry originally. Neither of us looked like we belonged there.

I sat forward and quietly asked, “Would you excuse me?”

“Where are you going?” It would have been a perfect moment to just say that I needed a pee. But no. Not Harry, so not me. He just tried to leave without another word and she wasn’t having it. “Hey! What's your problem?”

And there went Harry’s secondary trigger of being confronted by assholes. “I'm a Catholic whore, currently enjoying congress out of wedlock with my black, Jewish boyfriend who works at a military abortion clinic. So, hail Satan, and have a lovely afternoon, madam.” I loved the lines when you said them and it was fun to say them, too, but seriously time and place Harry! Honestly!

And then I got up and made my way towards the rear exit. And I heard the woman ranting behind me about my burning in hell and not being saved and that I would eat my babies. She wasn’t the most rational of people. And then from the corner of my eye, I saw someone’s cell phone light up with the Valentine signal screen. I knew what that meant, though it wouldn’t effect me thanks to the earplugs I had inserted before I entered the church. They produced a counter signal that blocked out Valentine’s wave. And I always found it ironic that people in this church hated Valentine because he was black but that didn't stop them from taking his free sim cards.

I stopped in my tracks, just as Harry had done originally. But I knew what I was doing as I turned towards the bigoted woman and drew my gun. I counted the three seconds Harry had taken to just hold it on her and then I did as he had and pulled the trigger, blowing her head off.

Then the madness began. Everyone in that church began fighting and trying to kill each other. When Harry was in my place he was a caught up in the wave as the rest, his training and the bulletproof suit the only thing to save him. But he still got stabbed and slashed and smashed with things and shot though the bullets didn’t penetrate the suit. 

But this scene, it was different. It was bloodier. The parishioners were nearly completely mindless in their rage. They fought not just with the actual weapons they had on them - and it was so odd how many guns these Americans brought when they went to church - and the improvised weapons of candle holders and pieces of wood, but with their very bodies in full. They were not just punching and kicking, they were biting and clawing, as if they were wild animals. 

I could have stood back and watched but it would have been suspicious. Besides, as Harry once told me, I needed to let off a little steam. So, I waded into the fight, shooting, stabbing, electrocuting, breaking necks, breaking backs. I was totally in control of my lethality and thus able to watch my back, as well as taking out target after target. I got hit a few times but was never stabbed or sliced up. I do believe I accounted for over 80 percent of the deaths in that church. Harry’s actual count was just over sixty percent. And some of his original moves I replicated, like shooting the irrational woman at the beginning and impaling the pastor through the jaw and out through his skull with a sharp pole at the end. Other things I didn’t do, like breaking a man’s neck and then shoving an armed lighter grenade in his pocket while standing only feet away from the explosion. I did use the lighter grenade. But I tossed it towards a group of parishioners on the other side of the sanctuary. I aimed it to explode above their heads, just above and I set it to maximum. It took out five of them at once. 

Yes, I’ve already said that I am sociopathic, possibly bordering on psychopathic. It is a Kingsman trait. We’ve had this conversation and they deserved to die. And the timeline needed to be preserved to a point. 

Anyway, once everyone in the church was dead, I pretended to come to myself and just looked around at the carnage. I had heard Merlin in my ear throughout ranting and trying to get my attention but had ignored him until he gave it up as a lost cause. This would have been the moment for him to try again but I suspect he was in shock. I know that I was when I watched it live in Harry’s office, the unencrypted feed streaming on his laptop. 

I made my way to the front doors - a foolish move but understandable due to the shock Harry must have been in at the time, having no control over his own body and killing so many. And there on the other side, just as before, just as I had known from listening to the tracker bugs would happen again, Valentine and Gazelle, with two thugs to either side armed with automatic weapons. 

I stopped and looked at the billionaire and followed the script once more. “What did you do to me? I had no control,” I lied. “I killed all those people. I wanted to.” That was true enough.

Valentine grinned and nodded at me. “Clever, isn’t it? In simple terms, it’s a neurological wave that triggers the centers of aggression and switches off inhibitors.” 

I scowled at him. “Transmitted through your nasty, free sim cards, I assume?”

He strolled towards me as if he had not a care in the world. “Do you know what this is like?” His lisp truly annoying me. “It's like those old movies we both love. Now I'm going to tell you my whole plan, and then I'm going to come up with some absurd and convoluted way to kill you, and you'll find an equally convoluted way to escape.”

Thanks to the time travel that _was_ more or less true. If Valentine had known about _that_ little plot twist he would have been _thrilled_ at it. But he didn’t and I continued with the script of the original confrontation, “Sounds good to me.”

“Well this ain't that kind of movie.” He smiled at me and I tensed, knowing what was coming. I tapped a button on my ring and hoped that everything worked the way it should. He raised a handgun level to my face and turned his head as he pulled the trigger. 

In the original timeline, even though he turned away and was not ready for the recoil, the bullet still pierced Harry’s head and he bled out over the course of an hour or so. Unconscious and brain dead the whole time. This time, the button I had pushed had activated a small magnetic field around my head - where my hood was over my face and the nanos were showing Harry's face - and it diverted the bullet to miss entirely. I fell back, throwing my arms up and knocking off my glasses, making sure they aimed back towards the church doors and not towards me or the parking lot. 

Valentine and Gazelle argued over whether he could be said to have killed the people in the church and then left, never checking the body. They hadn’t the first time either. Bond villain level of stupid in that moment, those two.

I laid there for several minutes, listening to them drive away and then got up and used my nanos to send a signal that would gradually lower and then block Harry’s life signs from Kingsman’s servers. To all back in London, particularly to Chester King, Galahad would be slowly dying for the next hour and a half, _slightly_ longer than originally but long enough for my next phase to take effect.


	7. Episode Seven

I got in the car, and drove back to the cargo truck I had left Harry in. Once there I abandoned the car and drove the truck to the airfield where my jet was parked. In the private hangar, I carried Harry, still unconscious to the jet and dressed him in a robe and slippers before bucking him in. I made sure he was in a comfortable position and used a pillow to support his neck. Then I went to the cockpit and we took our flight back to England. 

I landed the jet in the airfield I had left from and again carried unconscious Harry Hart around. I laid him in the back of the faux Kingsman taxi that sat in the hangar I had rented months earlier. I buckled him up once more, though he remained prone. I had prepared the seat belts for just such an eventuality.

I turned on my surveillance equipment and as we drive to the tailor shop, I listened to Eggsy’s conversation turned confrontation with Arthur.

“ _ Arfur, Harry’s dead. _ ” I remember when it was me telling him that. I was still in shock over what had happened but I was thinking about how Harry’s feed had been encrypted before and even though I had heard Merlin talking to him, I was still off my game a bit. 

“ _**Galahad** is dead. Hence, we have just drunk a toast to him. _ ” He put that wrong. Except for his purposes, he didn’t really. Galahad never dies. Lancelot, Percival, Bors, Merlin, Kay, they never die. The agents who hold the title die. The knights live forever. But to Chester, Galahad was dead, not Harry. It was a telling distinction, especially then.

“ _ Well, then you know what that psycho's doing. How many people around the world have got them sim cards? Valentine can send his signal to any of ‘em, all of ‘em. If they all go homicidal at the same time- _ ” 

When it was me, I was still trying to make sure that Arthur knew exactly what Valentine had revealed. I worried that they had only known Harry was dead, like with the previous Lancelot. They had lost his bio-signal and knew he died but they didn’t know how or why and never retrieved a body. We actually found it in a morgue area in Valentine’s compound after everything went down in the original timeline. Gazelle had literally cut him in half with her leg, straight down the middle, head to crotch.

But I listened to Arthur interrupt as we neared Savile Row. “ _ Indeed, and thanks to Galahad’s recordings we have Valentines’ confession. The intelligence has been passed on to the relevant authorities. Our work is complete and a most distinguished legacy for our fallen friend, it is, too. _ ”

Eggsy’s next words sounded defeated and lost. “ _ And that’s it? _ ”

It was a terrible time for me, then. And Arthur’s speech was not sitting well with me. I didn’t know why but I felt sick. I pushed it aside back then as an effect of what I had seen and been helpless to affect. But I was still wary.

“ _ Come sit down, boy. _ ” And didn’t that just put a spotlight on how Chester felt, almost exactly like I, or now, Eggsy, was a dog.

“ _ This is an 1815 Napoleonic brandy. And we only drink it when we lose a Kingsman. Galahad was very fond of you. And on this occasion I think it’s acceptable for us to bend the rules a little. _ ”

I have always recalled these moments with total clarity. Even so many years later, I recall him focusing on pouring two glasses of the brandy while I glanced at his head and then trailed my eyes down and saw it. Behind the ear, the scar that Valentine left after putting in the head explosives. He was so caught up in his little play he was putting on that he never saw my slight start as I realized the implications and my brain started working at twice the speed, parsing possibilities and scenarios. An idea blossomed in my mind as he finished pouring and I knew I would try to act on it. I felt that I was finally reading the old wanker right.

I listened as Eggsy inquired, “ _ Are these all Kingsman? _ ” I knew he had pointed at the portraits on the other side of the room and that Chester had turned to observe them as he did.

“ _ Yes, they’re founder members. _ ”

The cab pulled up in front of the closed tailor shop and I darkened the windows as I exited, leaving Harry’s unconscious form in the back seat. As I entered the unlocked doors - Eggsy had not locked them behind him after he had entered, not that locked doors would have stopped me - I listened to Cheter continue on, “ _ I want you to join me in a toast. To Galahad. _ ” I strolled silently up the steps to the top floor as I heard the glasses clink.

“ _ To Galahad. _ ” Eggsy sighed out over the bug. “ _ Harry says you don’t like to break rules, Arfur. Why now? _ ” 

I waited outside the door to the conference room, allowing Eggsy his moment of revenge. “ _ You’re very good, Eggsy. Perhaps I will make you my proposal for Galahad's position. Provided, of course, that we can see eye to eye on certain political matters. _ ”

I watched through the crack in the door as Arthur reached for the pen laying nearby. “Can you guess what this is?” Arthur pulled the primer down.

Eggsy shook his head, glaring at the old man. “I don't have to. Harry showed me. You click it, I die. I thought that brandy tasted a bit shit.” 

Eggsy’s tone is cavalier, a little too calm but Chester ignores the warning inherent in it and huffed a laugh, likely thinking it just bravado. “Bravo.”

Eggsy sat calmly, playing the part of Bond in peril to perfection, drawing the villain of the piece out. I suppose Chester felt he was too good to learn anything from Hollywood spies. It gave the chav that he underestimated the upper hand. “Valentine won you over, somehow.”

Chester parroted Valentine's explanation for his plan verbatim, explaining he had followed Harry after the dinner to Kingsman and found a willing convert in Chester King’s class bigotry. “Once he explained, I understood. When you get a virus, you get a fever. That's the human body raising its core temperature to kill the virus. Planet Earth works the same way: Global warming is the fever, mankind is the virus. We're making our planet sick. A cull is our only hope. If we don't reduce our population ourselves, there's only one of two ways this can go: The host kills the virus, or the virus kills the host. Either way the result is the same: The virus dies.”

Eggsy continued his drawing out of the traitor, “So Valentine's gonna take care of the population problem himself.”

“Well if we don't do something, nature will. Sometimes, a culling is the only way to ensure that the species survives. And history will see Valentine as the man who saved humanity from extinction.”

Eggsy then showed his roots and anger over the whole idea, “And he gets to pick and choose who gets culled, does he? All his rich mates, they get to live. And anyone he finks is worth saving, he’s keeping them safe, whether they agree with him or not.”

And Chester pointed at Eggsy for a moment. “And you, Eggsy. In Harry's honor, I am inviting you to be part of a new world. It's time to make your decision.”

Eggsy drew the moment out. I knew exactly what he was thinking. I recall when I was him. Even if my plan backfired, there was no way I was agreeing with this old wanker. And to use Harry’s death as a prod, to say it was in Harry’s honor when it was against  _ everything _ the man had fought for his whole life. No! But still, I let it play out when it was me and Eggsy did the same this time.

“I'd ravver be wif Harry. Fanks.” He emphasized his accent as he spoke the line, working to needle Chester to the last.

“So be it.” Chester pointed the pen at Eggsy unnecessarily as he clicked the primer back into position, activating the poison. The two men sat there for a few moments before Eggsy realized his plan had worked and looked down at his chest in feigned confusion. It was an awesome moment when it was me in his place. And then Chester began to lightly convulse as the poison  _ he _ had ingested, not Eggsy, took hold, hoist on his own petard. 

And Eggsy took his turn to gloat, perfectly acceptably after what he had gone through, in my opinion. Of course, I  _ am  _ biased. “The problem with us common types is, that we are light-fingered. Kingsman's taught me a lot, but sleight of hand; I had that down already.” Eggsy shook his empty glass at the dying man.

Chester groaned and convulsed, cursing his better with his literal dying breaths, “You dirty, little fucking prick.” And with that final denouncement, Chester King’s head hit the table and he died.

I watched Eggsy rise from his seat and look at the fallen man for a moment before he picked up the pen that would have killed him and instead killed his would-be murderer, unscrew the cap and plunge the tip into the scar on the dead man’s neck. 

I took this moment of concentration on his part to make my own move and entered the room, hitting Eggsy with a sedative dart from my watch. It wasn’t an amnesia dart. I had no desire to take this memory from him. But I needed him asleep. And so I assured it.

I completed removing the chip as Chester's phone beeped with a warning countdown to the start of Valentine’s plan. I pocketed the phone and the chip, picked Eggsy’s unconscious body up and made my way to the elevator fitting room. I laid the boy on the floor and returned to the cab, carrying my other unconscious friend inside. 

It was fairly easy to do. It was quite late, or rather, early, and Chester had sent everyone home hours before. He had wanted to be alone to contemplate the future he knew was coming and to do some sabotage at the shop. Instead, he allowed himself to be killed with no witnesses and me to take Eggsy and Harry to the bullet train to the country HQ. 

Before I left the main floors, I set up a transmitter. It would jam Valentine’s signal much like my ear plugs had done at the church. It would cover the main floor of the building and the upper offices but wouldn’t reach the street or the buildings next door. It was specifically shaped and built for this exact purpose before I left my time. 

The first time around, after I had let Arthur kill himself and I had used the murder weapon to dig out the chip in his neck, I had to find a way to Merlin, the one person I knew that I could trust. Or, well at the time, I  _ hoped _ I could trust him. I had never liked Arthur and even though he could be a sadistic arsehole, I  _ had  _ liked Merlin. I trusted him. Which was why I had been so hurt when I thought he had sent me to jump out of a plane without a parachute. When that had been revealed to be a trick it solidified my original thoughts and feelings. 

So, I had to get to Merlin. I had planned to just take the cab that I had stolen earlier and drive to the estate but then Chester’s phone had gone off with the countdown timer. I couldn’t afford to take the time then to drive there. I needed to take the bullet train. But I wasn’t in the system as a valid user for the elevator. I had to lug Chester’s body down the stairs and into the fitting room so that I could use his hand to get in.

And, by the way, that’s a bit of a hole in security there. There is no system to read if the handprints are attached to a living agent. I could have even cut off his hand rather than dragging his fat arse around whole. I didn’t have the tools available to do that but I could have. And it still would have given me access. 

And seriously, lugging Chester’s corpse down to the fitting room was a huge deal. He had evidently let himself go since he wasn't on missions. His suits were cut to hide it but he had packed on some serious weight in the stomach and arse areas. He must have weighed nearly 21 stone. 

This time, however, I could have simply used my nanotech to mimic Chester’s hand or Harry’s hand but I saw no need to do that since I was going to have to carry Harry there anyway. And frankly there is a huge difference between lugging a fat arse corpse down some tiny stairwell and carrying a  _ right fit  _ gentleman spy through a shop area to a fitting room. Granted, I still had to carry someone down those damn steps, but Eggsy weighs even less than Harry and about half of Chester. And it’s also a difference between literal dead weight and unconscious weight.

Therefore, once I had both Eggsy and Harry in the fitting room I placed Harry’s hand on the mirror and we started our descent. As we lowered towards the train, I sent a signal to Cal, letting him know the time had come. He should have been collecting people for the last 24 hours or so but this was a final countdown for him. And all I could do was trust that he would get it done. I had to focus on my primary mission. 

And there was now only one mission for me to focus on. I had completed my personal missions. Dean was dead, his gang was dismantled, his goons dead or in jail, Mum was in rehab, Daisy was safe with Cal and Mickey, the lists from the knights were ready to die or be saved - though the latter was in Cal’s hands now, and Harry Hart was alive and well rather than lying dead outside a hate church in Kentucky.

Now, the only focus was my primary Kingsman mission. _Plan A_. The mission that would hopefully save the world. I thought the first time around that I _had_ saved the world. _Everyone_ thought that we had. But we didn’t and now, I was attempting to right the wrongs and do it right. 

When we reached the bottom, I carefully carried Harry and my younger self onto the bullet train one at a time. Then I sat down myself and the hatch closed and the train took off. As we traveled, I pulled my hood over my face and activated the full protocols. The nanos showed my own face, the one you see now, but the nanotech was acting like a full-on biohazard containment suit. And now, I would find out if my hacking of the Kingsman systems had worked. Before I had accessed the elevator, I had sent a signal to the surveillance systems to show video of the previous timeline. The monitors should show Eggsy in the elevator with Chester’s body and on the train by himself.

In the previous timeline, something had tripped an alarm somewhere and Merlin had checked the footage and been ready with Roxy, now Lancelot, when I arrived. I hoped the same would happen again. I needed them to be there, in the disembarkation area for the train when we pulled in. 

And they were. The train pulled in, the hatch slid open and I saw them standing there waiting. And I pressed a button on my suit. This set off a bit of sabotage I had set up when I was doing the rounds as Chester months before. First it set off a flash bang and then a fast acting sedative gas. I hadn’t been confident that I could take both Merlin and Roxy on my own with only a minimal surprise level. And I wasn’t positive they wouldn’t have more knights with them. True, last time it was just them but this time could have been different. It ended up not being but it  _ could  _ have.

So, they were distracted by the flash bang and before they could recover enough to fire at me properly, the gas worked and they were unconscious. I couldn’t let any of you be awake until it was all over. I had too much respect for your skills. I could  _ not _ take the chance that you would stop me and I didn’t have the time to convince you I wasn’t insane or wrong. But I had to keep you safe. Harry as my primary _personal_ mission and Eggsy, Merlin, and Roxy as part of my primary _Kingsman_ mission.

It was still very early in the morning and I made my way to a storage room and retrieved things I had stashed there when on the inspection tour. I had a palette on wheels and I carefully placed all of your unconscious bodies on it and covered you with a shelf system that was designed to add space to the pallet. I covered this in several layers of cloth and electronics. Most of it was junk and for show but not one of the few in the tunnels that I passed gave me a second look. Granted, I didn’t pass any knights or handlers, just tech support staff and two medical techs.

I pushed the cart into the room we’re in now, a computer system office, and locked down the entrance to my own biometrics. I set up several jammers for Valentine's frequency in each corner, placed each of you on the floor and left to the storage room once more. I loaded up with pillows, blankets and air mattresses, canned food, bottled water, and other non-perishable food, basic medical supplies like paracetamol and bandages, and then covered it all in junk electronics and cloth. Again, I was paid no attention by those I passed by as I returned to the computer room.

I used the supplies to make you all as comfortable as I could, placing the air mattresses in the center of the room, the area most protected from the signal, and checked Chester’s phone display. The countdown which had been 6 hours when Chester dropped dead now stood at just over 4. 

That gave me plenty of time to finish preparing for the next phase. I set up multiple laptops and computers in the room and began hacking into the backdoor I had installed into Valentine’s systems when I first arrived and toured his facilities. Once into the basic system, I used the chip Eggsy and I had taken from Chester’s neck to slip into the more protected area where those codes were stored.

I had everything set now. The programs were ready to go. The computers were logged in and locked onto the appropriate areas of Valentine’s mainframe. I activated the view screens in the room and set them to various cameras throughout the world. I had chosen this particular room both because it had biometric security and because it was once a command center for the knights until Chester abandoned it when he became Arthur. He said at the time that Kingsman knights deserved the grandeur of the conference room over the stark concrete of this bunker. Ironically, this is likely where he would have taken cover himself during the events if he hadn’t been able to fly to Valentine’s stated coordinates. 

Rambling a bit again. The point is, this room has over a dozen view screens. I set three to London traffic cameras - Trafalgar Square, Charing Cross, and Savile Row outside the shop, one to Paddington Station, four to New York - Times Square in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge, Liberty Island, and one inside the New York Stock Exchange, one in downtown Los Angeles, one in Rio with a view of the beach, two in Mumbai, three in Japan - Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. I also had one of them set to cycle through twenty other cities around the world, from Egypt to Morocco, from Moscow to Sydney, from Paris to Rome, from Mexico City to Vancouver, from Washington DC to Boston, from Edinburgh to Dublin, from Madrid to Shanghai. And the main screen cycled through a few security cameras in Valentine’s mountain bunker. Three in place on his “ballroom” and two in his control room. 

Oh, yeah, I had visited that bunker during my “tour”. I didn’t want to give it away but I had things to set up there to prepare for the coming actions. I already knew my way around from the first timeline and it was actually incredibly easy to sneak in. Granted, he was barely started with his plan when I went there but still, it shocked me. I was pleased since it meant I was able to do what I needed to do without hassle but it made me feel odd, like Fate herself was making sure I was able to complete my mission. And I don’t like the feeling of there being any kind of higher power. It freaks me out. I’m an atheist. I don’t really understand how you can spend any amount of time as a Kingsman knight and still believe in any sort of benevolent deity. I lost my faith before I had been a knight for a year.

Once I had all of the cameras set up, I sat back and relaxed. The timer had thirty minutes left and I used the time to have a meal and to make sure all of you would remain out for another few hours. I also put an IV in Harry’s arm to get him fluid since he had been unconscious for so long. I didn’t want to kill him through carelessness and dehydration after saving him from Valentine’s poorly aimed bullet.

I listened as Valentine spoke to Gazelle about how depressed everyone in the ballroom seemed and she suggested that the idea of mass genocide was hitting home with them. He proceeded to give a pep talk and get them to start partying and enjoying the end of the world and the start of a new age. And then the clock began counting down the last few minutes and I readied myself to watch the events unfold and counter the issues as they occurred. To make sure things went according to Kingsman’s plans, those created by the future Arthur, Merlin, and the knights of the Round Table and entrusted to me to make occur.


	8. Episode Eight

Valentine counted down the last ten seconds as if it was New Year’s Eve and he was Dick Clark. When the count hit zero, he laid his hand on the biometric scanner on the touchpad console and within five seconds, it was warmed up and the signal began broadcasting. 

I watched the screens showing London first. I saw people in the street at Trafalgar Square come to a dead stop as all around them, phones, tablets, laptops and other devices equipped with the free sim cards began broadcasting the aggression signal. 

By the time twelve seconds had passed from Valentine’s hand touching the tabletop, people had dropped their devices and began turning on one another. Buses and cars began smashing through the intersection, running down people and slamming into other automobiles. Pedestrians began hitting, punching, kicking, strangling, clawing, biting. Others who had guns - illegal and otherwise - began shooting at random people. People pulled out pocket knives and began slashing and stabbing at complete strangers and friends alike. People on upper floors were flinging others off of the heights and out of windows or balconies, even through closed glass. On the ground, people picked up shards and used them as improvised weapons. People grabbed hunks of stone from the ground or buildings that had been damaged by the cars and began bludgeoning others. 

I turned my attention to Rio and watched as people turned to the easiest method while on a beach and dragged others under the water, drowning them. All around the world people were going insane and brutally murdering the closest living person. Even in the parts of the world where the majority of the population had been asleep weren’t immune. The signal woke them from dead sleeps and I watched in Tokyo and Sydney as people tumbled from buildings, covered in blood and still in sleepwear, looking for new targets.

After the signal had been active for ten minutes, I turned my attention to my computer. I accessed the program that activated the neck chips on Valentine's converts, accessed thanks to the one from Chester’s corpse. I placed a block from the program that would bring up the system on Valentine's table and began detonating explosives. 

I started with the ones that I had placed in the list of “must die” from Arthur. I knew that one way or another, those chips would be set off and so I had knocked out and implanted one in each of them. None of them were approached by Valentine in the original timeline and so he wouldn’t have found out. I sent the command to explode and got back confirmation that all of them had died. And no, they didn’t know they had chips in them. I had better equipment and was able to make the scar so small as to be almost unnoticeable to the naked eye. Even to a hand running down the area it would feel like a scratch, like a necklace had scraped them or a fingernail. Nothing suspicious. And now they were all dead. Mission complete.

Next, I turned my attention to those with the chips that were not in Valentine’s bunker or in touch with him. This was actually the majority of them. Most had not wanted to go to the bunker and so had created their own safe areas. And few of them were of enough importance to Valentine  _ at this moment in time _ to be in contact. 

I pulled up three cameras on one of my laptops that I had planted, knowing from the previous timeline that people would be hiding there. Sadly, one was in Buckingham Palace. I watched in sorrow as I pushed the button and the queen I had once, long ago, admired and loved like any proper Englishman, died quickly and gruesomely, her head bursting into pieces. Her death was shortly - within milliseconds - followed by her husband, all three of her sons, her daughters-in-law, her daughter, her children’s former spouses, several of her grandchildren, and the younger of her two royal grandsons by her eldest son.

I knew that the elder of her grandsons, his lovely wife and their children were being held in Valentine’s bunker, unwilling to agree to his plan. He had kidnapped them to keep them safe from his culling but they were not implanted. He made a very good king once upon a time in my life. 

And the royal grandchildren and great-grandchildren, many of them didn’t have chips. The younger ones couldn’t tell because they weren’t told anyway. And the older ones were only told if they were over sixteen. Several of them disagreed and were in the bunker. The younger ones were in a “playroom” bunker at the palace, deep underground, a former bomb shelter from the Cold War. They were deep enough to be away from the signal, watched over by several nannies and governesses who didn’t know what was going on and so didn’t have implants. We found out after the fact last time that the royals had simply ordered them to show up at the palace and told them there was a terrorist threat and the children needed to be kept safe. Valentine approved of the plan since they would be away from his signal and not know the truth until it was too late.

Several of them emerged from isolation to find their own children were dead, killed by their spouses or babysitters last time around. That wouldn’t be an issue this time. I’m a bit of a bleeding heart even now, I suppose, and I was the one who went to the palace and freed them last time. I got to know them. There were twelve. Within three months, there were only four. The others killed themselves, one way or another. Three were direct suicides, walking in front of a train, a jumper from the cliffs of Dover, and slit wrists. The others, it was self destructive behavior that led to their deaths: two overdoses on sleeping pills accidently mixed with alcohol - there were no suicide notes, two drunk driving accidents where they drove into a tree at high speed or off a cliff, and one who took sleeping pills and fell asleep with a lit cigarette in their hand.

This time, I arranged for Cal to pick up their families once the carers had left for the palace. They would be safe at my house. I had deliberately chosen an isolated spot and it was filled with jamming devices and Cal knew to search all of their belongings and put anything with a sim card, Valentine’s or otherwise - to be safe - in a shielded box in a shed over fifty yards from the house.

All over the world, over five thousand people’s heads exploded. People from rich backgrounds like the royal families of several countries to managers and high level workers at Valentine’s’ factories. Even certain lower workers had been given the chip, agreeing to it because they cared more for themselves than others.

I suppose you’re thinking that I’m a hypocrite. I could have stopped any of those people out there who were being killed from dying. I know how it seems. But it isn’t what you think. It isn’t sociopathy or psychopathy. I care and I _hate_ my mission. But I _understand_ my mission. _You_ don’t. Not yet.

I watched the monitors, one after another, London, New York, Boston, Tokyo, Sydney, Morocco, Egypt. As time passed, gradually there were fewer and fewer people fighting on the screens. No fighting, just the dead and the dying. 

Watching Gazelle and Valentine on the security feed, I felt sick at the former’s glee as she watched satellite and security feeds. She was truly a ghoul, a very efficient assassin but with absolutely no sense of empathy whatsoever. She _revelled_ in all of those brutal deaths. Valentine kept his eyes away from the feeds. He was haemophobic and always projectile vomited at the sight of blood, his own or others. That’s why he turned away when he pulled the trigger in Kentucky. Ironic, he caused so much blood to be spilled but he couldn’t bear to see it.

An hour and a half after he first placed his hand on the table, Gazelle told Valentine that their target appeared to be reached and he lifted his hand, ending the signal. The assassin with the bladed feet walked to her boss and lover and embraced him as he smiled at her, seeming thrilled with the success of his plan.

And at that moment of their exultation, I sent the command to his tabletop and detonated the little surprise I had implanted shortly after I arrived in this time. The desk exploded and they both fell to the floor. It was a grand explosion, filled with large chunks of shrapnel but I didn’t depend on that to kill them. The explosion released a nerve toxin, a gaseous version of the Oxford shoe blade’s poison. The furthest camera from the explosion was still working and I zoomed it in to watch the toxin spread through their bloodstreams. It was extremely satisfying.

In all, the explosion and their deaths took under a minute. When I turned my attention to the cameras aimed at the ballroom of the bunker I watched the chosen ones panicking and trying to determine where to run. The glass around the control room had held so the gas didn’t escape. But the rich and famous weren’t sure if the explosion had been an accident or not. I didn’t give them more of a chance to wonder. I zoomed the camera in on a particular occupant of the room, someone I had gotten to know and dislike during my time at Kingsman. I don’t know if he and his family were converted by Chester or if they had been approached by Valentine himself at some point, but I pressed the button to detonate the final head explosives and watched with a sense of peace as Charlie Hesketh’s skull and brains splattered all over the ballroom.

It wasn’t as satisfying as using my Kingsman signet ring to electrocute him - which is what happened last time - but still it was an awesome thing to watch. Classist, cowardly bastard, got his just desserts in both timelines.

After watching Charlie lose his head - shithead, I double checked the files to make sure I had exploded all of the neck chips. That took about five minutes and I had not missed any. 

I got on the public address system in Valentine's bunker. There were over nine hundred hostages in cells - beautifully appointed gilded cages but still cages - under his mountain. All of the kidnapped royalty, singers, actors, philanthropists, scientists, business moguls, politicians, artists of various kinds, and just regular people that he had liked but who hadn’t agreed with his ideas were there. And now, all of their jailors were dead, from the head - hah hah - honcho himself down to the lowest employee who had been charged with cleaning the cell’s bathrooms once a week while the hostages were held at gunpoint by soldiers. 

“May I have your attention, please. Hostages please, may I have your attention. Several things have happened over the past few hours. Valentine and his entire operation are dead. Everyone who agreed with him and accepted a chip blocker to his signal, is dead. Unfortunately, this occurred  _ after _ his plan had completed. Millions, probably billions, of regular people are dead. I am hacked into the computer system at your current location but am actually halfway around the world. I can release the cell locks from here but you need to be responsible for getting yourselves out of there. The blueprints to the complex show a large kitchen area near the ballroom. The ballroom is located one hallway to the left of the last cells. According to my information, those cells hold Iggy Azalea and Bono. I suggest you all get something to eat and drink if you can. For those with weak stomachs and the young, be aware the deaths of your captors were very messy. Really, incredibly messy on a lot of levels, so please try to keep the children from seeing. On either side of the ballroom are staircases and elevators to the lower levels. There are dozens of private jets there that can be used to fly you out of there. Be aware, it is  _ highly unlikely  _ that there will be any sort of air traffic control at  _ any  _ airport you approach. You need to be able to manually land a plane on your own. But, it is also  _ highly _ unlikely that there will be many other planes in the air by the time you leave. The world has gone to absolute shit and Valentine’s new world is here, though he won’t get to enjoy it. I need to disconnect but I wish you all luck. Godspeed and God bless.”

And with that, I released the door locks and the cells began opening, I saw on the security system. It was like the weirdest red carpet I had ever seen, the people there together. I hoped they would manage. Last time, I was there in person to assist and explain. But I knew the caliber of many of them. They were strong willed. They had refused to bow to Valentine’s wishes even after being locked up for weeks and months. 

Oh, and the airplanes, the signal was coming from satellites. Not from cell towers. If anyone had a device with a chip turned on, even if the wifi signal was set to airplane mode, the signal activated. The first time around 95 percent of the planes in the air when the signal hit went down. Most of them by pilots who just became kamikazes. And the few that weren’t affected would have landed by the time the kidnappees were in the air. 

Once I had freed the Valentine hostages, I spent another ten minutes cycling through the cameras from around the world that I had hacked into. I saw lots of dead people and a few injured but alive. All of the alive were in deep shock, however. The signal had ended and the rage had just disappeared, leaving them surrounded by corpses, many of which were their fault. Valentine's wave had been “survival of the fittest” at its most brutal. Those who had fallen to the rage and survived were the most skilled, the most athletic, the most dangerous, the quickest, and in some cases, simply the luckiest.

I couldn't do anything for any of those survivors. They would have to deal with the new reality as time passed. So, I darkened the screens and turned away. I had one more task to complete. I went to the bag I had brought with me from the future and extracted an old-fashioned HAM radio. I connected it to the wires in the room which would extend it’s reach and broadcast range.

“Mordred to Excalibur. I say again, Mordred to Excalibur, come back.”

I repeated the greeting three time before I my heart left my throat and a reply came through. “Excalibur here in Avalon, Mordred. Over.”

I smiled. “Greeting from the castle. Merlin, Galahad, Lancelot, and the squire are with me, though presently on ice. The battle is over but its aftermath will be large. You should remain in Avalon for another day or so. Galahad, Merlin, and/or Lancelot will arrive with the Grail by then. Over.”

“I am pleased to hear you are all safe. Avalon is filled to capacity and more. The lists were fully checked off. Even the late contacts are here and safe. I was able to access the magic safely and saw some of the battle. I agree that Avalon will remain locked down until the knights or wizard arrive. Over.”

I let out a deep breath, amazed it had all worked. “Thank you Excalibur. You truly are a wonder. I need to thaw out the knights and wizard but I hope to see you again. Over.”

The gravelly voice quavered just a bit, “I share that hope, Mordred. You truly are a noble knight. Over and out.”

I bit my lip to stop it from quivering. It made me surprisingly emotional to know that Cal cared even after knowing what I had, to him, allowed to happen. Or at least, were unable to stop from happening.

Then it was time to face the music, so to speak. I went to Harry’s bedside and eased the IV out of his arm, turning off the saline drip. I took out a pre-prepared syringe and injected it into the vein of the arm that had held the IV and moved to Merlin. I repeated the injection on him and then Eggsy and finally, Roxy. 

It took five minutes for Harry to begin to stir and the others followed swiftly after. I simply sat in this chair and watched and waited. Seeing Eggsy’s and Merlin’s faces when they caught sight of Harry was absolutely transcendent. Even if you all hate me for everything, that moment, that one act, saving Harry Hart, was worth it to me. No matter what happens in the end, I repaid Harry’s debt to me. He saved my life, literally and figuratively. And I was able to save him this time. It was my primary personal mission and even if nothing else had worked, _that_ did. And that was enough for me. Decades of grief and angst, resolved. I doubt Harry will ever be proud of me, but he’s alive to feel the contempt and hatred he thinks I deserve.

It took three minutes for you all to get over your shock and wonder what the hell was going on. I could actually  _ see _ the change wash over you. Your muscles tensed, starting with Harry, and your adrenaline kicked in. You began to change your positions to get in a defensive formation. Harry shifted in front on the two youngest, Merlin slid to the rear of the diamond, Eggsy without even thinking about it, slid to Harry’s left and Roxy, with only a single moment’s hesitation, took his right. It was truly a sight to behold. And then your faces when your eyes landed on me. A man you didn’t recognize simply sitting at ease in a chair, no weapons in sight. And I’m sure Merlin and Harry at least recognized the room you were in. But the expressions lasted so briefly they were barely more than micro-expressions. Brilliant poker faces, the lot of you.

I don’t need to repeat the conversation we had. You all were here and conscious for it. It wasn’t all that special. No mistakes for me to point out. Just demands that I hold still and keep my hands up, demands about who I was, just the basics. Until I answered.

So. That’s my tale told. That's what happened since I arrived. That's where you wanted me to start. I allowed you to cuff me to this chair and interrogate me. I expected it. I could have given you the drugs to wake you and then left, disappeared into the wind. But you need to understand the why. I  know you thought throughout my story that I was here to stop him, to keep V-Day from happening. And now, you know that it was the opposite. But because you insisted I start my tale in 2014, you can’t understand why this was my mission. And you  _ need _ to know. We hoped that this would fix things but Plan B may still be needed, insane as it is.

Let me tell you the rest of the story, the whys and the future I come from. Until now, it wouldn’t have sunk in and you would have resisted. Without knowing the present - as you couldn't having been unconscious for so much - you couldn't have appreciated the steps I took to try to prevent my future. Now, this is the tale of how it could have and would have been if I hadn’t been sent here. This is how it  _ was _ .


	9. Episode Nine

I’ll start with explaining how my original timeline played out. I mentioned some things in my earlier tale but you need more information, more details. My life and Eggsy’s were the same from what I can tell, from birth, to Lee’s death, to Michelle’s rapid descent into alcoholism, to her marriage to Dean and subsequent complete loss of connection with reality, to the hell that our new stepfather made of our lives, to trying to escape in the Royals only for Dean to twist Michelle into making us return before training was over, to losing hope until we stole Rottweiler’s car one chilly night, to making the call from the medal, to meeting Harry Hart on the steps of the police station, to watching him take Dean’s gang down hard, to him rescuing us from Dean’s retaliation and proposing us for Kingsman. Our training, barring the little dance with “Chester” on the terrace, was the same. We both chose the pug, thinking it was a bulldog, and named him JB. We both spent time with our unconscious mentor after his visit to Professor Arnold. We both passed all of our tests well. We both spent the night at Harry’s house when it was down to Roxy or us. We both refused to shoot JB. We both went to argue with Dean - though I actually found him but before I could get out of the car and fight him at the Black Prince, Harry took remote control of it then and drove it to his house, we both fought with Harry and were told that he didn’t really care about us, only his debt to Lee. We were both interrupted in this fight by Merlin’s call to Harry about Valentine and the church. We both stayed at Harry’s house as instructed and broke into his laptop, and watched his unencrypted feed.

Eggsy watched me slaughter the church goers, thinking I was Harry. I watched the actual Harry do the same, though to more personal damage to himself than I sustained and less lethality on his part than I accomplished. Eggsy saw what he thought was Harry’s death. In truth, Harry was fine and so was I. But originally, Harry was unprepared and in deep shock when he emerged from that church and faced Valentine. He died, slowly but never conscious.

When Harry’s vital signs ended, like Eggsy, I went to the shop to make sure that they knew. I wasn’t sure if Harry had encrypted his feed like he had when he was in the coma. Like my younger counterpart, I encountered Chester and saw the scar that signalled his betrayal. And like Eggsy, I used my sleight of hand skills that I learned as a youngster to switch our glasses just in case while Chester was distracted by the portraits of the founders. I played along and let him think he had succeeded until he killed himself by activating the poison. And frankly, even if I had been off and the poison had been in my glass, I meant it so deeply, those words, “I’d rather be with Harry. Thanks.”

But I didn’t die and I cut the chip out of his neck only for his phone to go off. My plans to drive to the estate were scuppered and I lugged his corpse down to the elevator to scan his palm so I could get the train. When I arrived, Roxy met me with a raised gun and Merlin listened to my tale. He believed me, with the evidence of the chip and Chester's phone and decreed that we didn’t know who we could trust and didn’t have time to figure it out. It would be up to the three of us.

We boarded a Kingsman jet that Merlin added some equipment to and flew to the mountains not too far from the coordinates on Chester’s phone. From there, Roxy climbed into a contraption from Reagan’s star wars program and using balloons, took a trip to the edge of the atmosphere. Her assignment was to use the missile her suit was equipped with to take out one of Valentines’ satellites, giving myself and Merlin time to get into the base to stop him. Merlin estimated that the loss of one satellite in the chain would mean several hours to re-route another satellite into position. Needless to say, Roxy, with her problem with heights, was not happy with her assignment but she couldn’t take my place. 

I was given the bespoke suit Harry had commissioned for me and was going to pretend to be Chester King. We were sure that Chester wasn’t anywhere near important enough for Valentine to meet him personally when he arrived. And only Valentine and possibly Gazelle knew what the old man looked like or even his age. Merlin took on the part of my pilot. And it worked. We bypassed the security thanks to the invitation information on Chester’s phone. I used my best mimicry and acting skills to be a complete classist arse. I even cheeked off to  Merlin after I had been accepted by Valentine's’ assistant, “Mycroft, you've just been promoted from my pilot to my valet.” 

I was escorted to the ballroom and ordered a martini as Harry had taught me so recently. Then I found someone on a laptop, approached him, caught his attention with a ridiculous remark, “Society’s dead, long live society” and after asking him the current time zone time, knocked him out with the amnesia dart. I shoved him over, accessed his laptop and got Merlin into the system. Before I could get out, however, I felt a knife to my neck.

It was Charlie. I’m fairly sure he assumed I had beaten Roxy and was Lancelot and he was there because his family had been invited. I _still_ don’t know if Chester was involved in that connection but it doesn't really matter. What matters is that he blew my cover wide open, shouting to Valentine that he had caught a spy. I could see the billionaire's shock and recognition from across the room when he saw me.  While Charlie was distracted I was able to press my signet against his throat and electrocute the shit out of him before knocking him cold with a single punch.

I jumped over the railing into the main ballroom below and ran back towards the plane. Unfortunately for me, Valentine enacted his security measures and the paranoid berk had an actual mercenary  _ army _ in that mountain base of his. I fought my way through labyrinthine halls, thanking Merlin constantly for his voice in my ear and the blueprints and cameras he was able to access as he guided me. 

As I ran, I broke arms, broke necks, stole guns, shot people, and ran. I dodged and performed crazy free running tricks on the stone and cement walls as I listened to Roxy set off the missile and then begin essentially a free fall from the upper atmosphere. I heard the hit of the missile taking out the satellite. But I kept running for my life through the twisted hallways of Valentine’s under-the-mountain bunker. I ended up at the jet with goons between me and my escape, another on my tail, and a jammed gun that was out of bullets besides. Merlin took them out over my head and I re-boarded the plane, fell into a chair and suggested we get out of there. 

Unfortunately, Merlin let me know that Valentine was more of a paranoid wanker than we knew and the satellites and aggression wave were protected solely by biometric security, not something he could hack around. Or, I presume, not something he could hack around with a very limited amount of time and a complete lack of surprise.

So, Merlin took me to into the jet’s bathroom and opened the weapons compartment. I’m a sentimental fool, and I was still reeling from Harry’s death, so I chose the Rainmaker. Merlin complimented me on my choice and left me alone to add anything else that I wanted. I loaded for bear, so to speak, adding grenade lighters, another gun, and of course, I was already wearing the Oxfords with the poison blade in the toe.

I left the relative safety of the jet and began to make my way back through the hallways of the base. I wasn’t being slow about it but my pace picked up considerably when I got a call from Merlin with an update, “ _ Eggsy, Valentines’ using someone else’s satellite. He’s going to reconnect the chain. It’s going to take him no time at all. It’s at 20 percent. _ ”

The bloody wanker and his rich friends. It was just our luck that day that the satellite Merlin chose for Roxy to destroy was very close to another that was owned by one of Valentine’s converts. We saw later on the security feed that he simply called him up and got permission to piggyback the signal in seconds. So, basically, Roxy’s trip to outer space bought us a few minutes rather than the few hours that it was supposed to.

Then another wonderful bit of news from my Scottish handler, “Eggsy, it seems like Valentine's got a present for ya. Get a move on!” It was another entire division from his mercenary army, about fifty soldiers on my tail, soldiers who knew the ins and outs of the base much better than I did.

I rounded a corner and met my first set of mercenaries. They began firing and I unfurled my broly, deflecting the bullets and then turned and did the same to another group, after sending a lethal stunner into the first. As I stunned the second group, a mercenary with a bigger gun and armor piercing bullets fired at me. The poor umbrella took a beating but his aim was for shit and missed me entirely. I lobbed a lighter into the midst and it exploded, taking them all out.

I started down another tunnel that I knew led to the ballroom but had to retreat from a large group of the mercenaries at the far end as they advanced on me. I turned down another tunnel taking out the two soldiers at the end only to have the hall fill with a dozen more, firing at me. I covered my face with the arm of my bulletproof suit and huddled against an receded alcove in the wall. The mercenaries I had just retreated from were coming from my right and the ones who had herded me into this hallway were advancing from my left. I had limited ammunition and even the suit couldn’t handle that much punishment from over twenty automatic weapons at once.

I reported my situation, succinctly to my handler back on the jet. “Merlin, I’m fucked.”

And in my ear, he replied, “ _ As am I _ .” 

He later told me that the mercenaries who we had seen on the ledge outside the jetway had brought the anti-aircraft missile system inside and were going to use it on the jet and him - since he was inside. It was a bit of a dangerous idea, to set off such a massive explosion in such a relatively small, narrow, enclosed, more or less underground space but no one said Valentine’s mercenaries had to be smart. Rather the opposite, I expect.

I reported to Merlin with more detail, “They’re coming at me from both sides. I’m out of options.” I knew I was about to be killed and would join Harry and I had one thought in my head as I faced my mortality. And I had to try to do something about it. If the world was going to go to hell and I was going to be dead and unable to stop it, I knew Roxy had landed and detached from her chute a bit ago and was listening in, “Rox. Rox, I need a favor. Call my mum. Tell her to lock herself away from Dean. And the baby. And tell her I love her.”

There was no guarantee that she would be in any state of mind to even listen to Roxy but it was the best option. It was still fairly early in London and she shouldn’t be too high yet. Dean didn’t like her to be completely smashed until later, he like her at least somewhat compos mentis during the day so she could pick up around the flat and maybe do some grocery shopping and shit like that. She wasn’t always able to abstain enough but usually she tried. Mostly because Dean controlled her stash, doling it out. So I had hopes that Roxy might be able to save them.

I heard the tramp of boots coming closer and closer. And I wanted to face my death with dignity, superior to my former self, you know. I was channeling Harry for all I was worth and had another thought about something I had seen once upon a time in school. ‘As if the way one fell down mattered. When the fall is all there is, it matters.’ I wouldn’t beg or plead, I would die on my feet and with my head held high.

And that triggered  _ the _ thought. I spoke, “Merlin, remember those implants you said were of no use to us? Any chance you could turn ‘em on?” I figured anyone in the bunker that wasn’t in a cell was implanted, even these mercs. After all his social secretary bird was the one that Harry first noted the implant scar on.

It took about a minute, but Merlin had Chester’s chip to give him an in and it wasn’t under the biometric umbrella. He triggered them. And suddenly the hallway was filled with little explosions and I discovered what the weird chemical that Merlin had picked up from Harry’s exposure to Professor Arnold. Valentine, the absolute sicko freak, had set the explosions to go off like fireworks and then expand up into a mushroom cloud over each headless body. And by activating them all at once, Merlin had instigated a full on fireworks display. We had checked over video from various hidden bunkers later of those who were Valentine’s chosen and cued them up to timing. Even those in the same room didn’t go off all at once. It was seriously like you could almost hear a symphony being directed as each head exploded. Sick fucker!

But all I knew at that moment was that these heads were exploding in fireworks and mushroom clouds. I had been right and the mercenaries all had chips. It was disgusting and oddly compelling to watch.

I congratulated Merlin on his hacking and was interrupted by a banging on the door in the wall behind my back. A woman’s voice was demanding to know what was happening and when I opened the window in the cell door I recognized one of the high profile kidnap victims, a Swedish princess, Tilde.

“Can you get me out?”

I was running high on adrenaline and couldn’t help but be cheeky. “If I do, will you give me kiss? I've always wanted to kiss a princess.”

She was desperate and disheveled. “If you get me out right now, I’ll give you more than just a kiss.”

I couldn't believe it but between the danger and the adrenaline response, I was all for it. I went to open the door when the PA system squealed and it was revealed that Valentine wasn’t as stupid as it might have been hoped. “ _ You motherfucker. Did you really think I was stupid enough to implant one of those things in my own head? What are you, fucking crazy? All of those innocent people killed, and for what? You didn’t stop shit! It’s still happening!” _

And with that, he had put his hand on the biometric system again. Only this time all of the satellites were ready to go. I told the princess that I had to go save the world. And she was such a desperate, little freak.

“If you save the world, we can do it in the asshole.” 

“I’ll be right back.”

Don’t give me that look! She had been locked up for quite a while and I was young and horny and had been in Kingsman training for ten months. I was sick and tired of only having a relationship with my right hand. And she was a princess!

I grabbed a gun from one of the headless mercs and checked the chamber this time. It was full and unjammed. I headed towards the ballroom, no more resistance between me and Valentine. Or so I thought.

The ballroom was filled with corpses and obnoxious disco music. I took aim at the control room and fired the automatic weapon. The paranoid fucker had made it with bullet resistant glass. I emptied the magazine into it, knowing it wouldn’t hold out forever. He was shoved away by his bodyguard, his hand leaving the table. As I went to change the magazine, that crazy bitch broke the glass from their side and leaped out, firing at me. I covered my face with the gun and when she stopped firing I turned it on her only for her to cut it in half with her leg.

Gazelle truly was an impressive operative. She would have made a great Kingsman if she hadn’t been raised to be a completely amoral psycho. Well, except for the undercover part. She isn’t exactly unmemorable with the swords that masqueraded as legs. But still, she was quite the fighter. It was all I could do to hold my own. And once I was being kept occupied by the assassin, Valentine felt safe enough to return to his plan. As his hand laid back on the table, the disco music picked up again and our fight nearly coordinated itself to it. 

Finally, she was on one side of the dance floor and I was on the other, having kicked her away, and ended up flying across the room and breaking a table in the opposite direction from lack of resistance. I had hurt her, something she wasn’t used to, I expect. And she lost her temper. She jumped high and I joined her, a long, high horizontal lunge kind of move. Her leg was extended and I twisted around it,clicking my heels together and then bending in the air to scrape her arm.

We landed and rolled, again on opposite sides of the dance floor but this time in exchanged places. I glanced down and saw that my tie had been a casualty of her sharpened prosthetic leg. It was cut in half. I held it up, scowling at her and then dropped it on the floor in front of my bladed shoe. I watched her eyes track down and widen as she saw it and put it together with the slash on her arm which was already turning green and black. Then she met my eyes again. I smirked at her and nodded. She had swords for legs but I had used the equivalent of a pocket knife and took her out. It was poetic justice. Seconds later the toxin reached her brain and she fell to the floor, dead.

Valentine, his hand still on the desk, began calling for her. I guess he realized there were no more fight pounds or something. But she couldn't’ answer him. I was lost for a few seconds in my gloating over the corpse of the wonderful fighter until Merlin chanted in my ear. “ _ Come on, come on _ !  _ Kill him!” _

I realized that Valentine was the issue and I still couldn’t reach him from my spot on the floor of the ballroom, he in the control room fifteen feet or more above my head and no idea how to get there. My gun was destroyed and it would take too long to find another one. Every moment I spent trying to find a gun was another moment the wave was active and people were dying. My frantic gaze fell on Gazelle’s body and the gleaming legs as they sprawled on the dance floor. I ran over to her, yanked one off and shook it to extend the sword. Then I made like an Olympian and threw the javelin into the billionaire’s back.

It worked. My aim was right on and it went right through his body. His hand left the console and he vomited when he saw the bloody blade in his chest. He then fell back through the broken window and hit the floor below. 

Merlin complimented me on my actions and declared that Harry was right about me. I made my way over to Valentine. I wasn’t about to make a rookie mistake and not check the body. And he was still alive! Fucker! And in character as a Bond type villain as he saw it to the end.

He looked up at me as I approached his bleeding, vomit covered body. “What’s up, man? Is this the part where you say some really bad pun?”

I could have probably come up with a brilliant one but I was so pissed and hated this man so much, so personally, I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. “Well, it’s like you said to Harry.” I leaned over and shook my head at the near corpse. “This ain’t that kind of movie, bruv.”

Unfortunately, I had misread him and it was enough to satisfy his sense of drama. He smiled at me. “Perfect.” And he died with the next breath.

I could be fine with him being happy as he died since he  _ was dead _ . He could take his satisfaction and happiness right to hell with him and tell the devil all about it. 

My adrenaline was even stronger than it had been and I decided I had an appointment to keep. I grabbed a bottle of champagne and two glasses and made my way back to the cell where Princess Tilde waited.

“Did you save the world?”

“Yes, I did.”

“So, you gonna come in?”

“Yes, I am.”

I smirked at her and closed the flap on the door and swiftly realized it was locked. I asked Merlin how to get in and he gave me the code. I told him then for the first but no the last time, “Merlin, you’re the guvnor.”

I went into the cell and she was waiting reclined on the daybed. The cell was beautifully appointed except for the stone walls and the cell door. The sheets were satin and it was a full service cell, complete with condoms, lube, and other toys to make a prisoner’s stay enjoyable, if lonely. A wonderful time was had by all. 

While I was occupied, Merlin took the quick hop to pick up Roxy and came back. Tilde and I had finished and were even past the afterglow by that point, so she dressed and helped me let the other prisoners out of their cells.

The corridor that held Princess Tilde was first and held most of the royalty that had not agreed with the culling. We released the cells manually and it was a serious rush to see these people that I normally only saw on the telly or the tabloids here in front of me, thanking me. When I reached a cell near the end of the row and opened it, I nearly fell to my knees, instinctively. Inside, waiting patiently with his young family, was the soon-to-be King of England, William. He was incredibly nice and their cell was the first one that held someone who wasn’t an adult.

The kids were really young and likely wouldn’t remember but this was  _ my _ royal family! I wasn’t about to let them be traumatised more than simply being here had done. I didn’t know at the time that the queen and the rest were headless thanks to me but the fact that his was the last unopened cell in this section and was the only one to hold members of the British royal family was ominous to me. The other royal families were next to one another. I had a strong suspicion that William and his family was going to be the only one to have survived V-Day. But I wasn’t about to make that assumption aloud. Not to him, not then.

“Your highness, Valentine is dead and we’re here to rescue you. There are a large number of hostages here. And there is a great deal of information that needs to be told to all of you. It would be best to do it all at once, sir. Also, you have the young royals and to be frank, sir, there are a large number of dead bodies here. Most of them fairly gruesome. You may want to cover the children’s heads so they don’t see. There is a meeting room that should fit everyone a few corridors from here.”

He nodded solemnly at me. “Thank you for the advice…”

My eyes widened. “Gary, your highness.” I wasn’t about to tell the future king to call me Eggsy, now was I?

“Thank you for all of your assistance, Gary.” He lifted up young Prince George in his arms and grabbed a blanket from a nearby sofa, draping it over the little boy's head as it lay against his shoulder.  

His beautiful wife walked over to me and kissed my cheek, causing me to gulp and blink before nodding at her. She picked up the princess, a mere babe in arms, actually delivered in captivity. She draped a spit up towel over her the little girl’s face and held her close to her chest. They followed me out into the hallway, grimacing when they saw the mercenaries’ corpses and the hallways full of royalty followed me to a conference room that had luckily been empty when we detonated the head fireworks. Everyone would have fit more comfortably in the ballroom but as it was filled with over a hundred headless dignitaries and the bodies of Gazelle and Valentine, we felt that a bit cramped was better than very ill.

Roxy, Merlin, and I continued through the bunker, manually releasing the hostages one cell at a time, until Merlin found a release command in the computer system. From that point on, Roxy would take a corridor and I would take another. We would play a recording into those cells of me explaining that their captor was dead, we were here to release them, there was much to explain but lots of people to free, the multiple dead bodies and that we were escorting them to a room with others where all would be explained. Merlin would then open all of the doors in that section. And we would lead them to the conference room. It took almost two hours to free everyone. 

We then gave a brief but thorough overview to everyone. They all knew about Valentine’s plan, they were here because they disagreed with it. So, that was somewhat glossed over. We explained we were with an independent intelligence agency and had learned of Valentine’s plans late in the game. We had infiltrated the base and been too slow to fully stop the wave but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. That Valentine had implanted those who agreed with him with chips that he could detonate if they tried to betray him. And that these chips had all gone off prior to the wave itself. 

It took hours to get everything organized for us to all leave. We found pilots for the jets in the hangar and arranged for all of the hostages to get back to their home countries. In the Kingsman jet, we took King William and his family, as well as a number of television and music stars who were British. 

We landed on a small airstrip a few hours from London. Heathrow and other larger airports were a mess and unmanned, essentially. We were able to get all of our VIPs back to their homes. Merlin contacted the remnants of MI5 and MI6 to collect them. 

Then Merlin, Roxy, and I made our way back to Kingsman HQ. It was horrific to say the least. We knew going in that Kingsman was down a king and a knight - Galahad. We didn’t know how far the corruption of Chester had spread. We _hoped_ it was isolated to him. Over the next several days, we found that it wasn’t. 

Kay, Bors, and Pellinor were dead, their heads missing. Nimue and Sagremor of the tech and handler divisions were also headless. Gareth, Yvain, and Gaheris died during the wave, the former two on commercial planes at the time - they had been undercover - and the latter surrounded by a gang of a Colombian drug lord. He took out lots of them but he fell as well. 

And Chester had been a right bastard. He had taken phones and tablets implanted with the sim card and just placed them in random spots around the estate. Over sixty five percent of the staff were dead and most of the remaining had major injuries. 

But, the thing was, Kingsman HQ was an aberration. If Valentine had survived, he would have been disappointed in the worldwide results of his wave. Granted, he hadn’t planned to only activate it for under six minutes but the Kentucky church had been active for less than five and only one person had survived.

But that test was not a good model on many levels. First, it took place in what the Americans call a “red state”. And those states are more conservative regarding things like guns and weapons. Or well, conservative to the American’s definition. They allowed concealed weapons in churches and it was a small town in a fairly redneck area, to put it nicely. There were a large number of guns in that church. 

Second, Harry was there. Harry was trained to use anything around him as a lethal weapon, up to and including his body. And he proved that in the church. Harry fucking killed someone with a fucking _hymnal_ , for crying out loud. Your average person on the street wouldn’t be able to do that.

Third, the church was a large group of people in a very enclosed space. When one fell, another was right there within arm’s reach. It was easy to find an outlet for the rage.

Around the world, those points were not present in many cases. Very few people carried guns at all times. There are very few people with lethal skills on the level of a spy. And many people were outside when the wave hit, or at least, in buildings where they weren’t surrounded by hundreds of people in a small area.

Granted, certain populations, like armies, gangs, and police forces, were decimated when they turned their guns and other weapons on each other. And I spoke earlier about planes crashing and drivers using their vehicles to run over pedestrians in the ultimate road rage. People were thrown out of windows and pushed off of bridges. But overall, the death toll was low.

On February 13, 2015, the worldwide population was measured at just over 7 billion. By the morning of February 15, 2015, the population was estimated to be around 6.5 billion. The death toll, not taking into account lingering injuries that killed months later or the suicides that followed V-Day when people couldn’t handle what they had done, was estimated to be around 800 million. Considering Valentine wanted the total population to be under 1 million, that was a good number.

And within two years, there was a baby boom as people refused to allow an insane terrorist to control their lives. By 2020, the world population had more than recovered. It was up to 9 billion. And it kept rising.

And there I go, rambling again. And getting ahead of myself, as well.

My point was that Kingsman HQ was badly hit. You had a preponderance of weapons added to the fact that even the handlers, tech and medical departments are trained to some extent, many of the former and a few of the latter were once proposals for various knight placements. No one from Kingsman had been foolish or greedy enough to take one of the free sim cards - or if they did, they didn’t use that tech at work - but as I mentioned, Chester knew that. He littered the mansion and grounds even with tablets and phones equipped with the cards. They were in lockers and cabinets and drawers under various detritus. He put them under the tray holders and taped to the bottom of the trash bins in the cafeteria and break rooms. He put a phone in the drop area of every vending machine in the building, all seven of them. He put a tablet under paperwork piled on the desks of five knights who were notorious for being slow on completing their reports - *cough* Harry *cough*. He slipped a phone into the lower compartment of every watercooler. He even just left tablets lying around on tables and desks, as if left behind in a hurry. He was a _thorough_ traitorus arsehole if nothing else. 

When the wave activated, the people here didn’t have a chance. Chester had sent out a memo recalling everyone but the knights who were on assignments out of the country to HQ minutes before the knights made the toast to Galahad. Therefore, HQ was full to the brim, every member of every department was present for what they thought was a meeting regarding a serious security issue. You see, even before the text came through on his phone, Chester knew from Harry’s glasses feed as he lay dying that Valentine was starting the wave on February 14. As he had walked away from what he thought was Harry’s fully dead body - which in reality was Harry’s fatally injured body - he commented to Gazelle that they would do it tomorrow. 

Therefore, Chester had prepared to destroy Kingsman when the wave occurred. He would have been safe in a bunker somewhere, either Valentine’s mountain base or more likely, another one, possibly the one beneath Kay’s house where Kay, Bors, and Pellinor were found, or the one in the middle of the Scottish highlands where Nimue and Sagremor took refuge. And the wave would take out the majority of those at HQ. After all, he didn’t want to leave behind people with those kinds of skills to come after him when all was said and done. That’s why he sent Harry to his death.

The medical department made out the best with only 5 fatalities out of 15 personnel. The tech department fared the worst. They lost 79 people out of the 91 who were present. The handlers and the three knights who were in HQ - Percival, Gawain, and Galath - actually fared surprisingly well. All three knights survived and only 10 out of 35 handlers suffered fatal wounds. 

Of course, when talking about non-fatal but serious injuries, that group fared the very worst. Broken bones, stab wounds, bullet holes, concussions all around, internal bleeding - which made it lucky that the medical staff was so lightly injured, they really did a number on one another. Luckily, the knights were all wearing their suits - and of course, many of the handlers also had bulletproof suits because, as you know, they often have to be on site on ops - and none of them were wearing bladed shoes or packing grenade lighters. But they were all armed with multiple guns - at least the knights were - and all of the handlers at least had hidden knives and other weapons on their persons. As a matter of fact, I learned that all of the female handlers had garrotes worn as underwires in their bras.

If the wave had lasted longer, the fatalities would have been near total in that group, between the preponderance of weapons and the fact that most handlers came from a background comparable to the knight’s backgrounds in the army or marines. And over 75 percent of the handlers were proposals who had passed the majority of the Kingsman tests but hadn’t shot their dog or had just not made the cut after that test.

The reasons for the disparity in the fatality rate: the knights and handlers were all in a single area when the wave hit. They were preparing reports on missions past and upcoming and accessing the feeds and servers in the handler room. The tech staff were almost all in their large workrooms, surrounded by their colleagues and deadly, untested weapons. The medical staff were mostly spread out through the medical wing. The wave hadn’t lasted long enough for those who were more isolated when it started to go looking for - or at least finding - those who weren’t within a few yards of their location.

So, upon our return to HQ, we found a mess. We had four knights present, plus Merlin and myself. During the time when Merlin had been enroute to and from picking up Roxy, the knights on assignment checked in, if they were alive. They were all trying to make their way back to England but with the mess in the world, it wasn’t going to be easy for some of them. But within a week, the Round Table assembled, many of the knights badly hurt and all of them traumatized on one level or another, but there were only 10 empty seats out of the 40 regular knights. The seats of 9 knights - five dead as traitors and four due to the wave - and the king needed to be filled. 

Merlin proposed that after all I had done, I deserved a seat. He suggested that I take Galahad’s seat and name. But, regardless of the fact that I saved the world while the rest of them killed dozens and dozens of often innocent people, they fucking unanimously disagreed. I had failed the dog test, arranged for the king’s death - or that’s how they saw it more or less - and was a chav. The last was the most important to the majority of them. They may have still had their heads but it wasn’t necessarily because they didn’t agree with the idea. 

The time between Chester’s recruitment by Valentine and V-Day wasn’t that long and Kingsman knights tended to long term assignments. Chester never had the opportunity to approach over 80 percent of them. And the twenty percent of those he had the time to approach but didn’t wasn’t due to their belief in equality - like Harry - but rather their moral compasses and that he knew they wouldn’t agree with a wholesale culling. Or that is what the shrinks said later in the internal reports on his defection. 

So, the snobbish arseholes refused me my mentor’s seat at the Table. Even Roxy voted against me. We never spoke about it later. I couldn't bear to hear her excuse and she never pushed on it. It put a distance in our relationship and kept us from ever being more than friends. I couldn’t trust her completely. Trust her to have my back in the field, yes. Trust her with my body when one or both of us needed comfort and connection, many times. Trust her with my emotions, my heart, to be mushy about it,  _ never _ . 

I think they would have relegated me to the handler department, even with ten seats to fill, if not for the fact that our newly crowned William V, King of England had awarded the George Cross to Merlin, Roxy, and myself for “ _ acts of the greatest heroism and of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger against the terrorist Richmond Valentine _ .” He even awarded the George Cross to Harry Hart and James Clarence, posthumously for their work against Valentine which led to us being able to stop him.

So, sorry Harry, but after your death, your name appeared in the papers multiple times. King William never let people forget your sacrifice and you even got schools named for you. I found it amazingly fitting that Daisy ended up going to Harry Hart public school when she was old enough. Merlin, Roxy, and I convinced the King to keep our names relatively quiet since we were still active agents but you and James, you were well-known heroes who fought the good fight against a madman and paid the ultimate price trying to protect the world. And yes, I meant the world. It wasn’t just England that praised you. 

At one point, there were a half dozen schools bearing your name in America, one less than quarter of a mile from that church where you died. After V-Day, when everything came out, the church was torn down and they built an orphanage there. And attached to the orphanage, on the grounds but not literally connected, was the Harry Hart Elementary and Middle School. Across the street from there was the James Clarence High School.

You were a hero to the entire world, Harry. 

So, anyway, I always thought you would have hated the attention but I always felt it appropriate. You were my hero and you died trying to stop a megalomaniac with more money than morals. So, there you go.

Well, to get back to the story, the knights refused to name me Galahad but thanks to King William, they couldn’t just push me into the depths of the mansion. So, Percival and Lamorak came up with the idea of adding a new seat, just for me. But it would come with the name Mordred. I hated them for that later, when I did my research. But I accepted. And even if I had known all of the connotations before hand, I still would have accepted. The name was appropriate, after all. I was responsible for Arthur’s death. And in future, it actually gave them pause. 

When they proposed the name, it was meant as a put down, a spit in my face. I wasn’t worthy of a true knight’s name. But over time, they realized that they truly were right with the name. I was willing to cut down anyone if they strayed, from the lowliest to the highest, whether in a country or within Kingsman. And I did it, too. 

At one point, the Arthur after the one who was appointed in 2015 - which was Lamorak - was selling Kingsman tech to rogue elements for access to their operatives. That was in 2021. I killed him after he set two knights - Bors and Gareth - to be killed. The knights praised me and feared me at the same time after that. After all, once could be considered a fluke, he tried to kill me, I fooled him into killing himself. But twice, not so much. Especially since I put a bullet between his eyes. 

From then on, I became every Arthur’s left hand, his conscience, just as Galahad was his right hand, his weapon and trusted advisor. The position of Excalibur was never again filled, not during my tenure. I was told later that they really should have appointed me to  _ that  _ spot after V-Day but well, they were wankers and wanted to rub my face in what I had done like a bad puppy.

So, I did what I always had done. I took what I was given and made it mine. I embraced the title. And I became Mordred. Not evil, not hate-filled, but not blinded by the idea of Arthur as king. Arthur was always just a man, not a deity, fallible and potentially corrupt. If he needed smacking down or more, I did it. I never deferred to Arthur just because he  _ was _ Arthur. I did what I was told but I always put the needs of the world, the innocent above what Kingsman wanted. I didn’t shoot the dog, I killed a traitor instead. And they would never let me forget it, so it informed who I became. Granted, over time my definition of innocent narrowed and obviously my definition of what the world needed shifted but that was inevitable. Between growing up, V-Day and its aftermath - which lasted for years, decades really in some ways - being a knight, and then the Event, I couldn’t be the same Eggsy who followed Harry Hart like a puppy. Harry was gone and I had to stand on my own. 

Until my accident on the snowy cliffside, I nearly channeled Harry to get by. Some of the knights found it absolutely creepy how much I seemed to resemble him. From the style of my hair to the cut if my suits to my glasses’ style to oxfords never brogues, Percival would say it was like seeing a ghost. Merlin would tell him it was more like a clone or his secret son. 

It was probably a good thing that they didn’t appoint me Galahad. I would have completely lost Eggsy in trying to be Harry Hart. As it was, my house was filled with Sun front pages. I never could bring myself to an interest in lepidoptery or taxidermy but until I had to change due to the accident and recovery, I tried _so hard_ to be Harry. I felt that it was at least partly my fault that he had died. I felt that if I had shot the gun at JB, I would have been in Kentucky with him and would have saved him. I deprived Kingsman and the world of Harry Hart, so I needed to be as much like him as I could. I studied his old case files, old videos of his missions, anything I could get my hands on. It wasn’t healthy but it was how I coped for years.

Nearly dying and the lengthy recovery caused me to have time to re-evaluate things, especially since the shrink I had to see wasn’t subtle about confronting me over the issue. He was great and made me see the guilt I carried wasn’t something Harry would have wanted. The doc made me accept that I didn’t have to atone for being me. That Harry wasn’t perfect and highlighted many of his mistakes within that mission - which I brought up earlier - and within his interactions with me. I had to accept my mixed feelings for Harry and what that last argument, in which he told me I wasn’t important to him except as Lee’s son, had done to my psyche. It was a long and painful self exploration but I came out the other side with a better understanding of myself. And I stopped lying to myself about how much that fight broke my heart. 

Well, I’m being very maudlin and sentimental, today. It’s just hard, you’re all alive and I’m talking to you but you aren’t the same as those I knew. Well, except Harry. But the Merlin and the Roxy I knew had grown and changed from this day. And our relationships changed after what we went through together on V-Day and after. But you  _ are _ them. It’s a real mind fuck. I’m actually dealing with seeing and talking to my younger self better than I am the rest of you. Which says something about me, I’m just not quite sure what.

Anyway, Kingsman was in shambles but we pulled ourselves together and recovered. I was appointed to the Round Table and went on missions. After about a month, I had my house set up and a healthy amount in the bank - though the economy was still shaky - so I went to get my mum and Daisy away from the council estate and Dean.

Dean had weathered V-day fairly well, surprisingly. He had been in the Black Prince when the wave hit and luckily for him, the members of the gang who typically were armed with guns - like Rottweiler - were across town doing a deal with some drug runners. Dean got slashed a bit, needed over sixty stitches on five different wounds and he broke bones in both of his hands, which were offensive injuries, not defensive. In the final tally, he actually beat three patrons of the pub to death with his bare hands. No breaking necks or fancy martial arts. Just pure brute strength and power. He beat in heads or chests until they stopped moving and moved on. Those three bodies were the only deaths at the Black Prince.

I dressed in my finest suit and went to find my mum at the Black Prince. I walked in and told her I had a job that came with perks, like a house. It wasn’t unbelievable, not then. There were a lot of people dead or incapacitated after V-Day and plenty of jobs for people willing and able to work. Lots of blokes and birds were able to make their way out of the estates and other poor areas after V-Day. Mum was going to come with me but Dean couldn’t see that I had changed and stopped her. He then proceeded to the insults and putdowns. And I really could not help myself. 

We were in the pub where I went with Harry and I was grieving and acting like his clone. I turned as if I was leaving only for Dean to throw one last insult, just as Poodle had done that day so long before. I walked up to the doors and proceeded to throw the locks one at a time, while quoting Harry as I did, “Manners. Maketh. Man.” 

I saw in the reflection that Dean was practically frothing at the mouth but Rottie and Poodle were trying to get him to back off. They remembered. They saw me and knew I had changed. They were seeing the echoes of the man who had so easily put them all down on the floor. But Dean, being Dean, wouldn’t listen and I hooked my umbrella around a pint glass sitting on the table by the door and used the reflection to toss it back and smack him right between the eyes, just as Harry had done to Rottweiler. I proceeded to turn and again quote my mentor, “Are we going to stand around all day, or are we going to fight?”

Unfortunately, Rottweiler and Poodle weren’t the only ones who saw what the outcome was likely to be. They all backed up, hands up and out to the sides. It was disappointing but even morons can learn lessons if the method of teaching is painful enough, I suppose. I held my hand out to Mum and she grabbed it with wide eyes. I unlocked the door and told the goons to make sure Dean knew to stay away from us. 

We went back to the flat and I packed Daisy’s things while Mum packed her own. I took them to my new house, in the same set of houses that Harry had lived in and got them settled before having a serious talk with her. I told her that she needed to get clean and sober. I would support her and Daisy if she promised to get clean, stay clean and stay away from Dean.

She agreed without a fight. It shocked me to be honest. But I found out that V-Day had scared her. She loved Daisy, as much as she could considering her condition and she had been mostly sober when the wave hit. She had done what Roxy had told her beforehand and locked Daisy in the bathroom and during the wave she had tried to break in and kill her. During the second wave she had used a butcher’s knife to cut into the door and had just climbed through the hole she had made about to swing the knife at her daughter when the wave ended for good. Mum knew she had done some bad things when she was high but she was never violent before. She understood that the whole world had turned violent that day but it still shook her to her core. 

So, I found a good inpatient rehab program and took care of Daisy while she got clean. I enrolled her in a preschool program and daycare. I was home when I could and when I had to be away on missions, Kingsman had a childcare program for the nighttime. They picked her up from care and made her dinner, played with her, bathed her, put her to bed and slept there, getting her ready for the mornings and taking her to preschool.

Four months later, Mum was declared clean and came home. She was awesome. It was like I remembered from before Dad’s death. I kept no alcohol in the house at all and she kept the house for me, cooking and cleaning, caring for her daughter and for me to an extent. Everything went really well.

But it couldn’t last. When Daisy was 5, I had a two month undercover mission and when I got back, I found my little sister in the kitchen trying to make pasta on the stove. Mum was passed out cold in the living room, the empty bottles on the floor and in the trash clear about what had happened. Without me there to be a check on her, she had begun to wallow and fell off the wagon. Daisy told me she had started drinking about three weeks after I left. It hadn’t gotten as bad as what I walked in on until the week before. 

I sent her back to the rehab facility but she checked herself out after a week. It wasn’t court mandated so it was her own choice. I tracked her down to the council estates and the old flat. Dean was still living there, though lucky for him he was out when I arrived. I tried to guilt her, to persuade her, I even tried to scare her back into rehab. But she lost it and blamed me for the hell that her life was. She said some completely unforgivable things and it broke me. No, Eggsy, I won’t tell you what she said. You may hear it personally from the horse’s mouth so to speak one day but I won’t make you live with it if it doesn't happen now. It would change you and how you feel about her. I will never not love her but I also will never not _hate_ her. 

I couldn't let her raise Daisy in that hellhole. I gave her an ultimatum. I told her she had a choice to make, either get clean and stay that way and I would take care of her like I always had or stay with the pathetic loser who whored her out when she high and never see me or Daisy again. She made her choice and I promptly went to Kingsman and had custody removal papers served to her. I gained custody of Daisy and adopted her and she became Daisy Lee Unwin.

I kept track of Michelle through Merlin’s efforts. I never saw her again but he told me when Daisy was 9 that Michelle had been found in the flat, dead from an overdose of heroin. Dean went to jail for supplying her with the stuff - it was cut with some nasty crap and over forty people died from it in three weeks - and for dealing drugs. 

Dean himself was shanked in the exercise yard after he’d been inside for two months. I didn't arrange it and I don’t know that if was anything other then his arsehole attitude getting on someone’s nerves but it wouldn’t surprise me if Merlin had been behind it. He hated Dean and had found out just a few months before the arrest the extent of what he had done to me as a kid. I had gotten drunk and he had been there, asking questions I never would have answered when sober. He started with asking how I knew the previous Lancelot and well, that rather opened the whole Pandora’s box, didn’t it? He was furious. I had always thought they all knew, that Harry had known. He had recited so much of my history to me that day in the Black Prince, I just thought him omnipotent on that front. 

It was a shock to understand that he didn’t know the extent of it. I was never arrested for prostitution even when I was young. Or especially when I was young, so he didn’t know. James only knew because he made it a point to know. He did surveillance and found out what was happening and repaid my dad by trying to save me. And he did kill the worst of my regulars. Rochester was truly a twisted son of a bitch. I’m pretty sure that one day he would have paid Dean well for the privilege of killing me while he fucked me. It was headed that way. And he was rich enough to pay enough for Dean to let him. 

Harry hadn’t even thought to check up on us until I called. And Merlin, well he had trusted that Harry was looking out for us. He told him he would handle us. Merlin didn’t understand that when Michelle rejected continued help, Harry hadn’t followed up. It really tormented him, that he hadn’t done his own follow up. But it’s all water under the bridge. What happened when I was young, when Eggsy was younger, it happened and can’t be changed now. It made us into who we are. It didn’t break us, it forged us into steel, strong, sharp, and deadly.

So I became a Kingsman knight and raised my little sister at the same time. We made out alright. She grew up well, smart as a whip and she had school opportunities that I never did. She got a fucking doctorate in biomedical engineering by the time she was 27. She had long before worked out that I wasn’t a tailor and she was recruited into Kingsman tech and medical after she finished her degree. She loved it. 

My life was fairly normal, for a knight. I had missions, some memorable - like falling down a mountain - some routine and fairly forgettable. Most of them will be moot now, especially since I implanted a bunch of the leaders with head explosives. My speciality was assassination and destruction. My missions weren’t exclusively that, of course. I pulled my fair share of honeypots and a few undercover ops. But when they needed someone killed, especially if it needed to be messy and salt the earth after, they sent me. I have the records of my missions so you can go over them and head off any future problems that may come up again. I have mission files for all of the missions from tomorrow until I came back, actually, not just my own. 

There were a fair few that were related to various mind control shit. Valentine opened that box and once people understood that it wasn’t science fiction but actually possible, well, the smart crooks worked on it to one extent or another. We tried to head off most of the more successful of those by putting them on Arthur’s kill list. But they are like cockroaches, them. There’s always another to fill the gap. Of course, the world population may not be enough to provide a true base for it now. Time will tell.

One of my more memorable missions was to take out a mysophobic bio-weapon developer in New York. And yes, his phobia was both ironic and completely understandable considering his specialty. He weaponized a strain of the influenza which caused high fever and high suggestibility. It didn’t kill but it left the victims open like they were under hypnosis while the fever raged. It created all kinds of problems. Especially since the damn thing was just as easily transmitted as the regular flu. Brilliant guy but completely amoral. 

I exposed him to his own creation and used the fever time to tell him to destroy all of the research and inject himself with a non-contagious strain of smallpox. It was something he worked on for the good of mankind until he let himself be sidetracked by his greed and megalomania. The strain acted like a vaccine but better, you got the illness but it couldn’t spread and as long as you didn't have a compromised immune system, you would survive and have true antibodies and not created ones. You had a miserable two days but you were safe for the rest of your life. He died because he  _ did _ have a compromised immune system, since I made him give himself a white blood cell inhibitor. He died in agony and with a sense of righteousness for his mysophobia. 

I always preferred the poetic justice version of payback. Fate being a bitch and all. But I was ready to put a bullet in his head if he didn’t die of the disease. I hung around and watched him in a locked isolation room until he died in convulsions. Then I checked the body and slit his throat, just to be sure. No overconfident Bond villain complex here.

So, I took out insane madmen with plans to take over the world in some way as well as run of the mill bad guys who kidnapped people for money or ran huge drug rings or plotted terroristic acts. It was a fairly normal life. For a Kingsman knight, at any rate.

Then, in the course of two months, the world went to shit and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it by the time it began. I said earlier that in the years after V-Day there was a major baby boom as people refused to let Valentine win in any way, even posthumously. 

It was a nice sentiment but it fucked us. By the time I was 42, the world population had hit nearly 10.5 billion and the population growth showed no signs of slowing down or stopping. There were some problems with famine in certain parts of the world but people had been working on crop bioengineering and it was working. Crops that used to take an acre to grow to produce enough to feed one hundred people for a month, now took up a twentieth of an acre. And the tech was shared fairly freely around the world. 

There was severe overcrowding in all of the major cities in the world, Calcutta and Beijing were horrific places to visit just due to crowds but again, people actually worked out ways to cut down on the poverty those cities used to brim with. The cleanliness issues and the diseases that ran rampant like dysentery from dirty water and waste pits, were solved. 

By 2022, fifty philanthropists had gotten together to solve the homelessness issues around the world. They bought land and built mini-flats. A thousand people could live relatively comfortably in space that would previously fit 200. And because they were built by genuine philanthropists, anyone could live there, regardless of whether they could pay anything. 

There were no true small cities anymore by the time I was 42. Every city had populations of at least 2 million. New York and Los Angeles each topped 15 million. London was filled with 12 million people. Tokyo and Sydney each housed 14 million. Paris was brimming with 9 million and Rome bulged with 10 million. Chicago, Boston, Miami, Marseilles, Bath, Brighton, Edinburgh, all of them had over 4 million each.

Then in 2033, two months after my birthday, the Earth decided it had had enough of us. The problem of global warming had never been solved and while people were recycling regularly and using solar panels and hybrid cars and such, 10.5 billion people were too big of an impact. On June 19, 2033, the polar ice caps completely disappeared. The scientists were never able to explain it but nearly overnight, they all finished the melting they had been doing for decades. It should have taken another fifty to seventy years for them to disappear but it just happened suddenly. 

And the addition of all of that water to the oceans with no gradual build-up, no warnings, added to a supermoon event which was already increasing the high tide, and we were all fucked sideways. The oceans rose over 200 feet in eight hours. The people directly on the coast had almost no chance. The tide came in as a tidal wave over 220 feet high. In the course of a day, the coastlines of every country changed irrevocably and many islands disappeared entirely.

Areas that were further inland had some warning as the water approached along former dry land and rivers which were now part of the ocean. I was in Russia on a mission and so missed much of it but I learned later that England HQ evacuated all personnel with less than ten minutes to spare before the wave of water hit the estate. The shop had gone under before that and those who had remained to try to help the civilians to escape to higher ground or onto helicopters, drowned or were battered to death by the water pressure and debris. Among them were five knights of the Round Table, Galeth, Galahad, Erec, Cador, and the knight known as Lancelot, properly named Roxanne Morton, my best friend.

After the wave’s advance stopped, whether by the height of the land above previous sea level or other factors, not a single country looked the same. Even landlocked countries had changed due to the addition of water to rivers that were fed by the ocean. England was less than half the size it had been. America’s “heartland” became its only land. Western Europe was mostly gone entirely except for now island areas around the Pyrenees and the Alps. Australia was almost gone, most of the country barely above the previous sea level and being so close to Antarctica. South America fared better than most thanks to its mountainous regions but it was still cut in half by the Amazon, no longer a river but rather a gulf nearly 100 miles wide. Japan became several small islands around their mountains and Egypt was nearly completely under the former Nile River. 

Within 24 hours, the world population went from 10.5 billion to just over 2 billion. And it continued to fall as other problems cropped up from the changes to the planet.

First was the sudden lack of land that had been used in many cases to grow crops. The land that remained was often not the same and new techniques to grow the former crops were needed. And that was only if you could find seed stock that had survived. 

Meat was also suddenly a huge issue. Many, indeed most, of the world’s ranches that raised cattle and other large animals for slaughter were gone and the ones that remained struggled to feed their stock. And then came the problems with distribution and refrigeration during transport. 

Gasoline was often inaccessible and alternate energy sources had never been completely relied upon though they were better developed than the current versions. Nuclear plants were underwater, offshore oil rigs were debris, pipelines were in pieces, and many oil fields were now lakes or under the ocean. People struggled to maintain any sort of normal life.

Fish became a main staple of nearly everyone’s diet. Fish and small vegetables that were easy to grow in a local small garden, either a community one or a personal one. Grains became scarce and high priced. Bread was a luxury and most everyone got their starches from rice or potatoes that they cultivated themselves. Luckily, the bioengineered rice that was much easier to grow wasn’t hard to get seed stock for. Meals became very Asian, almost immediately. 

Breakfast was typically either a rice type of porridge with honey or some fruit or eggs if someone nearby raised some type of bird. Lunch was salad or fruit with fish. And dinner was fish and rice with a side of vegetables. I grew to really like raw baby carrots and celery. But I really, really, really hate fish. And it is horrible because I used to love a good fish and chips for dinner. But now, even the smell of fish reduces my appetite. I won’t turn it away, I eat when I can, what I can. Hunger is too well known of an old friend - both from childhood and after the Flood - to turn away edible food. But I still hate the stuff.

Another problem that came up and decimated the population further was the advent of new diseases that came on the water. There were many theories about where the diseases came from. Some said they were ancient diseases that had been frozen in the polar ice and now were free to wreak havoc on a population that had no natural defenses against them anymore. Others said they were from the decaying of all of the bodies that had died when the Flood had hit. 

Very few - relatively speaking - had been pulled from the water to be buried. Well, I say buried but post Flood, funerary procedures changed. There simply wasn’t enough open land to justify cemeteries. Cremation became the norm. 

Other theories included the release of old diseases from corpses in the old cemeteries that were now under water or new diseases that had been developing in labs that were destroyed by the flood waters. 

I think it was probably a combination of things. And also, that it didn’t much matter. Wherever the diseases came from, we couldn’t do anything to stop them from coming. Most of them were resistant to some extent to antibiotics. And antibiotics weren’t as easy to produce as they previously had been due to a variety of factors. 

Some of the illnesses were so odd, almost caricatures of themselves. One of the worst was blood fever. That’s what we named it. It caused the veins to almost glow as the blood actually expanded in volume as the blood flowed through them and was accompanied by a persistent high fever that caused hallucinations. It started with itchy skin though there was no visible sign. Within 48 hours, there was a low fever, hovering around 100 degrees fahrenheit. The skin was clammy and the patients shivered as if freezing. Over the course of the next three days, the fever rose to between 103 and 105 and stayed there, triggering, often violent, hallucinations, auditory and visual. By the time the fever began rising, the veins were starkly visible all over the body and one could see the pulse of the blood rushing through them with the naked eye. On the fourth day of the high fever, it either broke and the patient began to recover or it spiked higher and the patient began to bleed from their nose and inside their mouth. No one who began bleeding survived. Within three hours of the start of the bleeding, the patient had a stroke and died, their body convulsing.

We couldn’t fight these diseases. We didn’t have the equipment or the personnel who could understand or find the cures or vaccines for these new horrors. Too many had died and the ones who remained were overwhelmed. They identified over 20 never before seen fatal diseases within two years of the Flood. And the mutation of others that were now harder to treat, like chicken pox and influenza. Five months before the machine sent me here I lost Daisy to blood fever. And three months before that I nearly died from a mutated strain of malaria.

By the time I activated the machine to bring me here, the estimated world population was around 750,000. It was difficult to get accurate numbers. Mass communication was only available through satellite links and those were limited. Air transit was nearly dead, only short range flight vehicles that didn’t require jet fuel were still flying. Plus a few blimps and such primitive things but they were also short range. And boat travel was doable but dangerous due to the unpredictable currents, weather patterns, uncharted underwater sea floor levels, and rogue waves on the vast ocean. Staying close to the coast and fishing was fairly safe but cross oceanic voyages were highly dangerous and not to be undertaken lightly.

A few months after the Flood, the remains of Kingsman came together in a compound we had created from one of Nimue’s family homes in the former Scottish highlands. It was a seven acre estate surrounded by a wall. We added barbed wire to the top and sensors throughout the grounds. There was a large garden, once for pleasure and filled with flowers and hedges that we transformed into a giant vegetable patch and rice paddy. In the former stables, we created a farmyard where we raised chickens and other birds, and a few goats and sheep, primarily for their milk.

Most of what was left from Kingsman was the tech division. The medical section also survived mostly intact, as did the handlers, but only if they were at the estate to be evaluated when the Flood hit. Only eleven knights and Arthur survived. Most of them had been on assignments and made their way back over the course of the few months after the Flood. I, personally, lucked out in that area. Where I had been on assignment wasn’t directly affected by everything and I was able to get my handler - who was on site - my contact - who was a Kingsman agent, though not a knight - and I on our jet and back to our new home within 36 hours of the loss of London.

Only five weeks after the world ended, almost, the time travel project was completed. Everyone agreed that if there was any way to avert this disaster, we should take it. The tech and research division worked hard to figure out what had happened and why over the first year. And when they did, everyone was horrified by the implications of what would need to occur to change our fate.

You see, Professor Arnold’s Gaia Theory was mostly correct. Humans were using up too much of the planet’s resources and poisoning it too much too quickly. Global warming was the planet’s attempt to save itself. And the vast increase in population and its resultant pollution just sped up the process. I have the whole thing in scientific language and all on my tablet but that’s the gist of it. 

Valentine was insane and sort of evil, as were those of his followers who agreed with his method and betrayed their people, but his idea was the correct one. There needed to be a vast _de_ -population _without_ a vast _re_ -population in order to stave off the Flood.

Unlike many missions, this one was  _ not  _ kept secret from the majority of Kingsman. It was deemed that everyone had a need to know on this matter. Not the general public but then again, we were quite isolated from them. The Kingsman knights were no longer an international concern. After the Flood, the idea of nations was - well, it wasn’t true anymore. The closest to a nation the way it used to be was America. And even there it was more a collection of city states that had an alliance. Most of the world grouped together in compounds like we at Kingsman had or grouped several “clans” together to form a small town. America still had a number of larger cities that had not been overrun by the waters but the diseases and famines largely depopulated them over time. So, even there, the city states were not huge spread out bits of land. The largest was Denver and it had a population of around 50,000 when I traveled here.

The Kingsman compound housed a total of 863 people at last count. And we had trading and protection deals with fifty-three other compounds or clan hearts - the Scots went back to old ways after the Flood - within the Grampian Mountains and further across the gulf into the Northern Highlands. When the Flood occurred, Loch Ness disappeared and became part of the former Moray Firth. The Northern Highlands were now an island as a gulf formed running from the Moray Firth to where Fort William had been. The majority of the Scottish lowlands were now part of the North Sea, Glasgow, St Andrews, most of Edinburgh, Kirkcaldy, Stirling, all gone. The Cheviot Hills and Southern Uplands had a few isolated steadings but they were cut off from the rest of the area by bad storms and horrific currents that swirled around them. 

So, Kingsman provided what basically amounted to police services to the area north of the former location of the River Tweed, including trips to the remains of the Hebrides and some Northern Channel islands that remained, like Arran - though it was much smaller than previously - Mull, and Skye. In exchange for policing the area and taking care of roving bands of thieves and boat homed “Vikings”, we traded for meat and crafted products, like furniture and clothing.

It was a large comedown indeed but that was the new reality. We had no way to get to the rest of the world even if we had a way to discover problems there. We became truly King’s Men, working on behalf of King George VII - whose father King William V had died in the Flood while visiting a Royal Navy vessel in the Channel. He was based out of Balmoral Castle or what was left of it. Most of the area was protected from the worst of it due to its height but the castle itself took some hard hits from the river’s rise. The royal family didn’t take up residence until after everything settled and didn’t actually live in the famous castle since it was too damaged but they built nearby, though higher and the area was still called Balmoral.

And the new king knew me, of course. His father often had me over to Buckingham Palace for tea. And he had been briefed on Kingsman early. So, after it all happened, King George got in touch and we worked out our new purpose.

I know I seem to be going off on tangents a lot but I need you to understand the world that I came from, the world I have been trying to prevent. It wasn’t just a small effect. It changed  _ everything _ . The Flood didn’t recede. The water levels remained, geography changed, weather patterns worsened a lot, and people had to basically revert to the 18th and 19th century in many ways to survive. We had electricity but not gasoline, not natural gas, very little coal, even limited amounts of lumber. To survive, you had to find a new way of life and adapt to it. Those who couldn’t or wouldn't change, died.

Kingsman researchers opened the door to fixing it all and every member of Kingsman brainstormed on how. Early ideas suggested using the Cold War - like the Cuban Missile Crisis - to start World War III. The problem being that while that would certainly kill the requisite number of people, it would also basically destroy the planet itself with the radiation and nuclear winter. And the main idea was to  _ save _ the actual planet, not make it worse. Large scale nuclear war would avert global warming but a new ice age accompanied by huge areas of land that were uninhabitable even by plants for centuries rather made the whole thing moot. 

So, we started looking at other ideas that wouldn’t harm the planet itself. These ranged from releasing a plague - or several - to decimate the population to adding poisons to water supplies or food supplies. Finally, some brave soul - *cough* Merlin *cough* - brought up Richmond Valentine and V-Day. He pointed out that if we hadn’t stopped his plan, it would have taken care of the population problem right there.

It was a hard thing to hear. But after several weeks of arguments and angst, we all agreed that this was our best bet. We needed to make V-Day work. But there were many problems with his original plans that needed fixing. It would be a job to get it done. And so, before he died of a heart attack in his sleep, Merlin began programming the AI - called Archimedes - to do what needed to be done.

It was unanimously agreed that I would be the one to go back. I knew the players and the events personally. And I was responsible for stopping it, so it was my task to fix it. We worked on the plans for months and months before it was decided we had covered all possible contingencies. The Kingsman knights compiled their lists - with input from the others - and I said my goodbyes. 

You already know what happened when I arrived. We went over all that. But I’ll explain specifics now. The blueprints that I adjusted with Archimedes’ help - I know you likely thought that I had tweaked the cards so that they wouldn’t work when I first brought it up. But that wasn’t the case, obviously. I tweaked them so that they worked  _ better _ . 

The tweaks I made increased the aggression if the card could connect with another card within sixty feet. If it could connect with multiple cards within that space, the wave strength increased almost exponentially. If the card couldn’t find another within that area, the force of the wave actually  _ decreased _ in intensity. But the card was constantly checking and if it came within another card’s zone, boom.

But I also added tweaks that caused a run of two hundred out of every 100,000 cards to be jammers instead of triggers. Archimedes also adjusted the distribution so that those runs would all go to the same areas, each. So there wouldn’t be one jammer in the midst of two thousand normal cards but rather there would be 200 jammers given away in the same area. And Archimedes worked to be very specific about these areas. Most were small towns, some were to go to specific businesses - to try to protect people we would need that we couldn’t get to a safehouse. A large portion of these were sent to airlines, for the pilots and flight attendants to have. We wanted to keep planes flyable and not brought down in kamikaze style by wave affected pilots.

The reason for the increased wave connection was obvious, I would think. I told you earlier that injuries were more common than deaths during V-Day. People just didn't have the training to kill with their bare hands unless the other party was helpless, more or less - like children against adults or the elderly against the young. So, we needed to increase aggression which led to increased adrenaline and thus more violent, stronger impulses. During the original V-Day, people punched and kicked for the most part, if they didn’t have a weapon, whether actual like a gun or knife or makeshift like a sharpened pole or a brick. In the new V-Day, people punched, kicked, clawed, bit, smashed, tore, and were fifty times more likely to find an improvised weapon. It made them sharper during the wave, not as animalistic and yet _more_ animalistic in a way. They weren’t smarter, just more ruthless. 

An example, during the V-Day that I lived through, the people on the beach in Rio, full of people from northern climates on vacation in the sun and warmth, were affected by the wave quite a lot. There were lots of phones and tablets on those beaches with free sim cards. And there were certainly deaths but of those deaths, of people on a beach, right next to the ocean, only 12 out of 130 were from drowning. And 4 of those deaths were from people who couldn’t get to shore when the aggression wave hit them. We know because there were no fight marks on them. The authorities in Rio made special note of it because people weren’t sure they were part of the V-Day issue or not at first. 

In this new V-Day, I watched Rio on one of the monitors specifically. One of the first things that people on that beach did was to drag the ones they were fighting to the water and work on holding each other under. I would say that the vast majority of the deaths on the Rio beaches will be from drowning this time around.

But I needed the wave to not be as fully effective as Valentine wanted it to be, thus the jammers. If the jammer cards were within fifty feet of another jammer card, it increased the range of the jamming - which started at coverage of seventy feet in a spherical bubble so that floors beneath and above were covered - to 150 feet each. And like the agressions cards, the jammers increased nearly exponentially when near many others. But they had an upper limit. A group of jammer cards, no matter how many were all together, could not cover an area larger than one and a half miles from the central card. The outer cards could go a mile and a half from them but each card couldn’t cover more than a mile and a half in total. It was complicated programming but Merlin and later his team, were brilliant in their programming of Archimedes.

And regarding the setting off of the neck explosives, it was debated hotly. In the end, I put my foot down. These were all people who were willing and eager to sacrifice everyone but themselves to survive. They were traitors to the planet, not saviors. They were the worst of the worst of the venal. If they were to survive the wave, they would appoint themselves as supreme rulers over the others who survived due to our jammers. They would consider themselves the elite and the the other survivors to be their servants. They already had that attitude within them to agree to Valentine’s plan without modifications. I made it clear that I would set them off before it was all over one way or another. Arthur agreed with me and so we arranged a plan of timing and Archimedes was programmed to infiltrate Valentine’s system and hide the explosions from notice. 

And Valentine’s vanity and megalomania was the reason I had to kill him. When I visited his base during my “touring”, I was able to set up the sabotage ready to be triggered that would kill him and his bodyguard lover without needing my presence on site. He couldn’t survive. His apathy towards the regular people was unacceptable in the new world. Not to mention his power base - even after I blew most of it up. So, I arranged for people to survive and for people to die. 

I helped aim Valentine towards black market dealers - by getting to the dealers not with Valentine - to get his cards into areas where the governments were wary of the idea - like Russia and China. I pointed people - future contacts from my time as a knight - at him who could facilitate meetings between him and leaders in those countries to ease their fears. The first time around countries like those weren't as covered by the cards as he wanted. This time, they were everywhere, just like in more capitalist countries. I made sure it would be a truly global wave this time around. And I waited to set off the head fireworks of his “friends” in the bunker until after he was dead this time around. It helped that I was able to do it remotely this time and not while hoping they wouldn’t kill me before Merlin could kill them.

Everything was ready when the wave hit. I made sure that Chester’s sabotage wouldn’t work here at HQ. I papered the estate with jammers when I was here. And I sent out a message to the knights and staff, except for the traitors with neck chips - seemingly from Arthur - that pointed to unknown dangers in Valentine’s free sim cards. Hopefully that cut down on the staff’s families getting them. I grabbed as many as I could for the safe house but I know I didn’t get everyone. I’ve done all that I could to minimize the hit to Kingsman.

So, that was Plan A. Make V-Day more effective. Fix the holes in Valentine’s plan and allow him to set it off. The world population is low now. But some people pointed out that it might still be too late. Global warming has long since begun and reducing the population may have only bought us breathing space. We may not be able to reverse the phenomenon but only postpone it.

Thus, the truly insane Plan B. If we can’t fix the planet in time to save humanity from eventual extinction - and it was coming in my time, we just couldn’t fully sustain ourselves, we had maybe a century or so before we were gone - then we had to leave the planet. Plan B - build three kinds of spaceships and evacuate humanity.

The first ship would take people and supplies to the moon to set up a colony there. It couldn’t be large due to power requirements of a dome to hold an atmosphere but it was a start. The next ship would have all of the things necessary to essentially terraform Mars. It would set up an eventual self-sustaining ecosphere with plants releasing oxygen and taking in CO2 like here on Earth. But it wasn’t sure that they could actually get that to work. It was hopeful but not a definite possibility.

So, thus the third type of ship. It would be built in orbit due to its size and would utilize the moon’s colony as a hopping off point. It would have artificial gravity and entire floors dedicated to food production. It was a long range, generational spaceship. It would be designed to house families as the ship traveled through space searching for a new home. Entire generations would live and die on a ship in space. Faster than light speed travel was out of reach and still science fiction, and the idea of cryogenic storage and sleep wasn’t viable either. So, instead, people living on spaceships, multiple generational ships travelling together from star system through the void to the next star system until a planet within the life zone of a system that had an atmosphere and was uninhabited by intelligent life was found.

Some thought we would come across other intelligent life before that happened but others felt that even if we did, unless they were more advanced than us, we shouldn’t make contact. That is something for the future to debate. 

I made sure that the minds that could make these dreams reality would survive V-Day, either through making sure they had jammers or getting them to the safehouse. None of those minds were chipped by Valentine, either originally or now, so it wasn’t too difficult. 

I told you Plan B was insane. But we should still probably work on it. Those generational ships would take years to build, and the lunar colony would have to come first, anyway. I have plans in Archimedes’ database.

And that’s my story. The whats and the whys and the hows and the whens and the wheres and the whos to a point. The next step is to recover from V-Day. I bought us time, at the least. Hopefully, it is enough.


	10. Episode Ten - Series Finale

I stood on the roof of the Kingsman estate mansion and looked out over the grounds. It had been three weeks since V-Day and I had been allowed out of the holding cell I had been in only that morning. I knew that I was lucky not to have been stuck there indefinitely. After all, there wasn’t really anyone in the wider world that would miss me. 

Most of those who had met me as Ryan Mordred were either dead from the V-Day wave or in the safe house with Excalibur. And if he inquired about me to Kingsman and was told I was dead, that I had died trying to prevent the wave or that I was caught in the wave and killed or some such tale, he would accept it and move on. Everyone who truly cared for me was dead, even in the future. That was one of the reasons I was so willing to come on this mission. 

But Harry, Merlin, Roxy, and Eggsy had believed my story. I suppose seeing all of the evidence in the files, photos, and videos stored within Archimedes helped with that. And so they released me from confinement. They hadn’t told me anything, I was just told by a tech that I wasn’t to leave the estate but I was free to wander it. 

So, I did. I wanted to see the estate itself and the timing of my visit to the roof was just a bonus. The beauty of the rising sun as it cleared the treetops and shone over the grounds was breathtaking. I never just took the time to take in the beauty of the world anymore. Even after I came back in time, I only saw the harshness and destructiveness of nature. The possibilities for death and loss instead of the quiet grace. But now, in this moment, I could see it again. My task was complete, anything that happened from here out was totally out of my hands. I had completed all of my missions and my life was now adrift. I could just stand in the rising sunlight and be me, Eggsy Unwin, not Agent Mordred, not Ryan Mordred. It was an odd and yet somehow free feeling, peace in my soul.

I watched as the sun rose in the sky and raised my head to bask in it and the door to the roof opened behind me. I turned my head enough to see Harry stride towards me. I was close to the edge, not enough to appear self-harming dangerous but close enough that he could throw me off with little effort on his part. If I didn’t fight him. I found that I didn’t care. If that was to be my fate, if my punishment for helping Valentine to succeed was to be my death at Harry Hart’s hands, I accepted it, even welcomed it on some levels. I wasn’t suicidal but I wasn’t willing to fight for my life either.

I turned my head back to its previous position and Harry came to stand beside me. He clasped his hands behind his back and stood straight and tall as he gazed at me in silence for several minutes. Finally, I suppose he realized that I was content in the soundlessness between us because he spoke, “Thank you.”

I inhaled deeply of the morning dew as it began to evaporate into the heating air. “Hmmm?”

He cleared his throat and took a step closer to me. I didn't even tense. “For saving my life. You went to a great deal of trouble to do so and if things had gone differently, you could have died in my place. So, thank you.”

I smiled briefly, mouth closed but lips curling. “You’re welcome.”

Harry shifted on his feet, the spy’s normal calm demeanor betrayed by his emotional state. “I wanted to tell you what has been found out over the past three weeks and what we have determined to do now.”

I sighed. “My mission is over, Harry.” I turned towards him but didn’t move closer or further away. “I have no stake in anything. I’ve told you all everything and it’s now your burden to carry. Saving the planet, saving the human race. I’ve done my part.”

“And we appreciate it, Mordred.”

I grimaced and I know he saw it. He bit his lip for a moment and took a half step forward. “My apologies. I can’t call you Eggsy. I know it is your name, to you, but it is so uncommon, and Eggsy is the boy, young man, who I proposed as a knight candidate the son of the man who saved my life, Ryan was simply your cover.”

I shook my head at him. “I understand, Harry. I’ve lived the majority of my life as Mordred.” I turned my head away and looked over the estate once more as my eyes filled with tears that I refused to shed. “Eggsy is Lee’s son, the fuck-up who couldn’t pass the final test, the one you were disappointed in when you went to what should have been your death. I always knew that, I could never shake the impact that final conversation had on me, no matter what I might have dreamed or wished. Wishes aren’t horses and beggars don’t ride.”

Harry stepped closer, now less than a foot and a half away from me. “I didn’t mean it in that manner. I meant that Eggsy is the young man downstairs with his dog JB. Eggsy is in his twenties. He’s bright and cheeky and naive in several ways regardless of the life he’s led. Even if Eggsy was a common nickname and wouldn’t be odd to others for you both to be called that, I simply can’t see Eggsy in you. You’ve hardened over your time as a knight and with all that you lost. You’re nearly my age and you’re cynical and sarcastic. There were brief moments where your younger self shone through during your interrogation and the tale you told but I’m sure those are normally few and far between. I can’t see Eggsy when I look at you and it has very little to do with your face structure.”

My shoulders slumped as some tension released at his words. “Mordred, then, I suppose.”

From the corner of my eye, I saw Harry shake his head in negation of my offer. “No. You don’t deserve that. You may have been Mordred for decades in your timeline but it still hurts you. They were wrong and unfair to put that burden on you after you saved the world.”

I turned my head and grimaced a weary smile at the other man. “I’m fine with being called Mordred, Harry. It was just difficult hearing it from you.”

Harry drew in a deep breath. “Ah. I - see.”

“I said it before Harry, I realized along the line that I loved you. I didn’t mean that I saw you as a father figure or a mentor and loved you filially or platonically. I loved you, romantically and soul deep, you daft git.”

Harry stood there, less than a foot now separating us, a completely befuddled look on his face, his mouth opening  and then closing as he seemed to try to find something to say to my revelation.

“Harry, I don’t expect anything from you. I never thought you would reciprocate. I just saw no reason to hide. Eggsy, that young man downstairs, likely feels some of the same things, if that helps. I know it started well before your death for me. But it intensified after I lost you. I went through so much on V-Day and after I became a knight, I looked to you as my rock, the memory of you in my mind brought comfort to me in the darkest times. You don’t need to do anything about it Harry. It just _is_. If it makes you uncomfortable, just avoid me or send me away or have me killed. If you would rather cultivate the feeling in younger me, he’s there, it wouldn’t take much, I assure you.”

Harry violently shook his head. “No! No, Eggsy, he’s a boy, barely more than a child, I’m not, he’s not my - no. I won’t be doing that. He’s too young, I’m too old, he’s too fresh and innocent for my dark soul. I’m twice his age.”

“Age is just a number, Harry. And Eggsy is wise beyond his years. He’s seen more than you can imagine, believe me, of the evil in mankind.”

Harry stepped forward. “No, I have no interest in Eggsy. He isn’t my type. And I don’t mean his class or accent. He’s,” Harry rolled his eyes, “a  _ twink. _ ” The word was practically spat out of the other man’s mouth. I wasn’t sure whether it was the idea of him wanting a twink or the need to use the word itself that caused the disgust but the emotion came across loud and clear.

“Alright, I won’t push.” My mouth twisted wryly. “I always knew deep down that I had never had a chance, that even if you had survived the gunshot or never been shot in the first place, you wouldn’t have wanted me.”

Harry pointed at me for a moment. “There. That. You keep doing that. The time travel and the changes you’ve made are causing you to have identity issues. Eggsy Unwin, the young man who is not my type, is downstairs in the mansion. _You_ are _not_ Eggsy Unwin. You are not that fresh faced boy who wears winged trainers and snapbacks. You are a knight of Kingsman.”

“I  _ was _ .”

“You  _ are _ a knight of Kingsman. That is one of the things I came to talk to you about. We would like to offer you your  _ proper _ place at the Table - Agent Excalibur. The knights have voted me to be the new Arthur and young Eggsy will take my spot as Galahad. You are the king’s sword, you proved it in your time as a knight in your timeline and you proved it with your mission here in this timeline. Will you take your place at my right hand, Excalibur?”

I gaped at him in astonishment as my breath began to hitch in my chest. “Are you fucking mad? I just killed billions and billions of innocent people, Harry!”

He smiled lightly. “Richmond Valentine killed them with help from their own greed. You arranged to save the planet. And you saved many. All of those families of current and future Kingsman that you sent to the safe house with Cal are alive. Worldwide there were only a dozen plane crashes and only two of them were due to the sim cards. The others were coming in for landing and the control towers sent them no info that they needed due to being caught in the wave. Your memo to the Kingsman staff about staying away from the sim cards kept many of their families safe, indeed only five died and they were all out in public, surrounded by the cards and they were all from traitor’s families. We wouldn't and won’t go after the families of the agents with head explosives but _they_ condemned their families, not you. And the jammers that you installed on the estate overrode the wave that came from Chester’s sabotage. No one here lost their minds. And the lockdown you instigated kept anyone from being able to leave the safety zone you had established here at HQ. You saved Kingsman and many other people.”

“The other knights - what did you tell them?”

“They know you are a knight from the future who was responsible for saving their families and them, as well. They don’t know who you were, that is, they don’t connect you with your younger self. And everyone knows that you were the one who locked them all in here and jammed the wave from hitting. And the fact that you locked them in early enough for them to warn their families - those that you didn’t already have safe thanks to your lists - to get somewhere safe because they all realized before the wave began that something was happening with the sim cards when the estate locked down thanks to your email. They all support you as Excalibur. It was a unanimous vote.”

I swallowed hard and closed my eyes for a moment. I didn’t deserve this honor but I couldn't bring myself to refuse Harry. I went to one knee and lowered my head. “Majesty, I am honored to take my place as your sword.”

Harry’s hand entered my field of vision and I took it up and laid a kiss on his signet ring. He reached forward and grasped my chin, raising my eyes to meet his. “Get to your feet, Excalibur.”

I stood and gazed at the man that I loved, my new king, waiting for his instructions. “What was that about? I’m not an _actual_ king, you know. I’m not Arthur Pendragon reborn. King William V is the king of England.”

I was surprised at his reaction. “That is how all of the knights received their place at the Table, Your Majesty. I’ve witnessed the ceremony numerous times before numerous kings of the Table.”

Harry shook his head. “I’ve seen many knights become knights and never have we done that.”

I shook my head. “I guess we became more formal after the V-Day in our timeline. More tied to the traditions of the Round Table of history. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Your Majesty.”

Harry frowned at me. “Stop that! Formality has its place but I’m _not_ royal. There's no royal we in my speaking, Excalibur.”

“My apologies, Arthur. I have always been overly formal with the king.”

“Your Majesty? Arthur? Why are you suddenly being so - I do not understand your sudden change in behavior, Excalibur.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “You’re calling me Excalibur. Therefore, you are Arthur. I learned over my time as knight to take my cue on formality from Arthur. If called by Eggsy, I called them by their name, if called Mordred - which was almost always from every one of them - then they were Arthur or Your Majesty. I told you, we must have become much more formal in my timeline than you are accustomed to being.”

Harry frowned again. “I told you, I can’t call you Eggsy, for multiple reasons, you are no longer Mordred and Ryan was never your actual name. Will you permit me to call you Gary?”

I sighed. “Yes,  _ Harry _ , you can call me Gary. When they were being informal, many of the other knights called me that. They were too high class to call someone Eggsy. So, I came to be used to it.”

Harry stepped forward, closing the gap between us fully, our chests touching. “Good. Eggsy is a boy. Gary is my equal, my right hand, my friend and possibly, someday, something more. I find you very attractive, both in face and in mind. I could certainly develop feeling for you but I won’t lie to you. I won’t string you along. I’m a gentleman, Gary, and I won’t just treat you like a whore. I suspect I could basically just crook my finger at you and you would come to my bed. But if something happens between us, I want it to be as equals and due to true feelings on  _ both  _ sides. I want to give those feelings time to develop, both mine and yours for _me_ and not the Harry Hart who has been living in your head all of these years. You never really knew me well before you lost me and then you placed me on a high pedestal that no one could live up to. We have time, thanks to you, we have plenty of time.”

Harry briefly laid his forehead against mine and then turned me around to look out at the estate as the sun lit up the grounds fully. He wrapped his arms around my body and held me close to him and I closed my eyes and breathed in, surrounded by the scent of the man that I loved, the man whose life I had saved, the man who was my king and who had just given me true hope for the future - one lived together whether as lovers or just as friends. And it was enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Complete, over and done with 10 episodes. Thank you for your time. Do not ask about a sequel. There will be none.


End file.
